movement-pass.github.io
Movement Pass
Live version
Repositories
Background
Few months ago Bangladesh Government released an application where we can register and apply for movement pass during the lock-down period for necessary reason. But unfortunately it was suffering scalability issues (I had to refresh the web page handful of times just to complete the registration process, let alone the pass apply). It was told that on the very first day of its launch it was hit by 160 million requests, though it was not clear whether it was simple website hit or people applying for passes. Nevertheless, it is a scalability challenge, to my knowledge none of the local company or I believe the Government has the infrastructure to withstand such load. This seems a perfect candidate for a cloud hosted solution and in cloud both kubernetes and serverless are taking the industries by storm. Here we are going to explore the AWS serverless services that can we can use to create a scalable solution. Some of you may ask why not kubernetes instead of serverless, well the answer to it is that it is not an either/or thing, you can have both kubernetes and serverless on the same solution, but working with startups in last 5-6 years where resources(both financial and knowledge) are limited, I find serverless solution is more viable comparing to kubernetes as it is easier to get started, almost no administration, auto and fast scaling, faster time to market, pay per usage which applies very much in startup environments. But it does not mean that serverless solution have limitation and shortcomings, in this solution we are going to explore those limitations and issues of serverless solution and how to overcome those challenges.
Features
As user of the original Movement Pass application, we may have seen the public facing portion, but large chunk of it is not known to us. But with our logical thinking we can assume, it should have:
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The public facing part (the website which is already available though a mobile application would be more appropriate).
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Approve/Rejection process, maybe human are involved or it may be completely automated.
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The verification, a mobile application for police department on the road for pass verification.
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Management Queries.
Roadmap
Rather than creating the whole solution in a single go, we are going to create it incrementally in the following order:
- Public facing application
- Approval process
- Management dashboard
- Verification application
On the technical side we are going to start with single AWS region and in the end we are going to refactor our architecture to make it a multi region active active solution to address the scalability and availability issues.
AWS Services
Here are the List of AWS services that I am planning to use and one or more of these services will be added to the solution incrementally as we progress to completion.
- S3
- CloudFront
- Lambda
- API Gateway
- DynamoDB
- Systems Manager Parameter Store
- SQS
- Kinesis Data Stream
- Kinesis Firehose
- Athena
- Cognito
- Amplify
- X-Ray
- CodeBuild
- CodeDeploy
- CodePipeline
- Route53
- CDK
Implementation
I am starting with both Node.js and .NET and do have plan to implement it in Golang as well.
As mentioned in the above, that we are going to incrementally implement the features and as we progress and new documents would be added in the following section: