Customer Situation

Logistics companies rely on messaging as a critical component of their business.

A client in the logistic and transportation industry had a need for always-on file processing. Messages would need to be automatically handled 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The process needed to be stable and reliable with minimal support and maintenance. The client also required the ability to store files long term and a backbone that would manage message queuing, all with the ability to horizontally scale as needed to manage heavy loads.

Solution

Our team helped the client create a solution that would leverage the strengths of APIs and the durability of cloud computing services. A combination of AWS and MuleSoft, which offers out-of-the-box connectors for many AWS services, quickly rose to the top as the best-of-breed solution that could meet the client’s requirements.  

Integrations and API development was accelerated with MuleSoft, which accommodated the need for always-on processing, allowing the team to develop robust and secure APIs and enabling non-technical users to have visibility into message management and performance.

To satisfy the client’s needs for queue management and file hosting, several AWS offerings were employed. Long term storage needs and a backbone for message queueing were met with AWS S3 file storage and SQS for the queue. MuleSoft provides built-in connectors for the seservices, and SQS was decoupled from MuleSoft to prevent message loss. AWS Lambda was chosen to handle the variable loads, thanks to its superior horizontal scaling capabilities.

Results

Thanks to a solution that combined industry-leading products and services, file processing for the client achieved significant improvements in both reliability and availability. With AWS and MuleSoft, the client can now process millions of files a day with no data loss in the last two years. Additionally, support and maintenance for message processing was cut in half.