Customer Challenge

WCLMS obtained the contract to provide transport services and solutions for competitors, staff, volunteers and dignitaries during the Commonwealth Games, held on the Gold Coast in 2018.

They quickly realised that the logistics of the contract required systems that far exceeded the capacity of their legacy, onsite infrastructure. There was an absolute requirement for a secure, scalable and highly available platform, capable of serving high demand.

It was also apparent that they could benefit from a significant technological overhaul of the software application architecture.

Fitzroy IT - The Perfect Partner

WCLMS chose to engage with Fitzroy IT because Fitzroy IT were uniquely qualified to take on the challenges presented by the Commonwealth Games. The project required broad experience across AWS Infrastructure Management, Systems Administration, IT Support, Hardware Procurement, Project Management, App Development, GPS Tracking Solutions and Web Development. Such diverse skills are rarely found in one place, but Fitzroy IT prides itself on the breadth and depth of its knowledge and expertise.

WCLMS were also looking for a partner to help guide them through the development of their platform beyond the Commonwealth Games. While WCLMS had a strong platform for managing planned events - transportation services where the routes, schedules, vehicles and drivers were known and managed weeks in advance - they had also identified a market-need for the management of unplanned events - emergency, on-demand services for public transport passengers whose train breaks down en-route to their destination.

Enhancing their software in this manner gave WCLMS the opportunity to gain market share and drove their adoption of more advanced AWS technologies.

Why AWS

Choosing AWS was a straightforward business and technology decision. Guided by Fitzroy IT, WCLMS could see that no other provider could meet their needs for bandwidth, local infrastructure, elasticity, fault-tolerance, performance, scalability and high-availability.

Solution

Initially, Fitzroy IT worked with WCLMS to design a new AWS infrastructure and plan the migration of their current software and data. During the migration WCLMS’ transport management application was replicated onto multiple Windows EC2 instances. This was done to provide redundancy and security separation of the data being processed for each Commonwealth Games organisational division.

WCLMS’ software was originally written in ASP.net and could only scale vertically, not horizontally. Fitzroy IT re-architected and rewrote it using PHP and JavaScript. This enabled a move away from Active Directory and Windows EC2 instances to S3, CloudFront, Fargate and RDS to simplify administration and increase performance and cost-efficiency. The new architecture was combined with the implementation of a streamlined build process that utilises CodeBuild, CodeDeploy and ECR.

Over time, further iterative changes were made to make the system multi-tenanted and to reduce costs by removing a multi-node ElastiCache cluster and replacing it with in-application caching.