Case Study
Pase Cultural
A card with discounts and benefits for high school students and teachers.
We built the first Serverless Application for the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, which offers access to exclusive benefits and discounts on cultural assets for 16- to 19-year-old high school students, and teachers from public schools. Students and teachers receive a debit card issued by Banco Ciudad to use in different cultural events. In addition, students receive exclusive benefits, special offers, and credit (ARS 2,000) every semester to use on shows, recitals, theater, movies, and to buy books and magazines.
The Challenge
The audiences of the platform, students and teachers, presented a great challenge considering the behavior and use habits of the application, which was extremely variable. The vast cultural offer in the agenda of activities proposed by the Ministry of Culture caused a distribution of user traffic throughout the week, and even in a large range of hours during each day. This resulted in complex planning of the platform's capacities to ensure the best end-to-end user experience while being cost-effective. In addition, the Ministry of Culture proposed as a goal for the first year to subscribe 80% of its audience through marketing actions, such as promotion of events, special benefits, and contests that generated a high volume of simultaneous users responding to such initiatives. In summary, the key to success was to have a completely scalable, fast, robust, and secure solution that was also cost-effective.
- The platform must have the elasticity to respond effectively to the marketing initiatives, scaling its capabilities rapidly as the user traffic increases and decreases while ensuring, at all times, the best user experience at the lowest possible cost.
- More than 70% of the users access the application from mobile devices through 3G and 4G connections; therefore, it must have an excellent download speed, less than 4 seconds.
- Due to the sensitivity of the information managed by the platform, it is of the utmost importance that each transaction is carried out in a secure end-to-end way.
The Approach
- We designed the architecture of this platform based on the business objectives and best practices of Serverless Computing. This kind of architecture has the highest levels of availability and resilience and is self-scaleable and fully managed by AWS. Based on the capabilities of Amazon Web Services, we implemented a 100% Serverless solution. The key was to use Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS DynamoDB, among other Serverless services, to successfully achieve the challenges posed.
- To build the web application, we relied on a mobile-first strategy. Using Angular to optimize the presentation of content and navigation workflows. In addition, we used Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront (CDN) to distribute these contents so that users can download them using the high-speed transfer to the closest server from where they are connected.
+4
API Gateway Endpoints
+100
Lambda Functions
+10
Dynamodb Tables
+90
CodePipeline Delivery
Partners
Key Results
- In the first year, we surpassed the goal set by the Ministry of Culture in terms of the number of subscribers to the program.
- We maintained the portal with an uptime of 99.99% per year.
- We achieved an average download speed of less than 3.7 seconds.
- We improved the annual cost of the infrastructure, being 30% below the annual budget.
- We obtained the certification of AWS Well-Architected Serverless Applications.
Conclusion
In collaboration with some areas of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, we assembled a multi-disciplinary team to achieve this great challenge. We decided to use Serverless technologies based on the business objectives and the particular characteristics of use by the target audience of this platform. We became the first public sector solution to use Serverless technologies mounted on Amazon Web Services. These innovative technologies allowed us to accomplish business results and generate enough confidence for other public sector projects to take a similar approach.
- We were able to confirm that Serverless technologies have the potential to completely change the way companies design, build, deploy and enhance their applications. It greatly reduces management and infrastructure costs and, in turn, facilitates large-scale growth, accompanied by business evolution.
- Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service by AWS that provides us with the resources to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure private and public RESTful APIs with the highest service levels according to the project needs.
- AWS Lambda is a disruptive technology where no servers need to be managed, and where it is only necessary to focus on coding the business logic and running it. This enabled us to build business logic segmented into discrete functions based on a micro-services strategy. These functions, which perform very specific tasks, then are orchestrated using an event-based architecture by modeling the required business workflows.
- AWS Dynamodb is a fully managed non-SQL database service with consistently low latency levels regardless of load level. This allowed us to ensure the best user experience for managing states, sensitive data and more.
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