Customer Scenario

Our client, a leading logistics company, was modernizing their connector framework with a good portion of their communications migrating to APIs. This created a major opportunity to be able to reconstruct the client’s connector framework. They needed to be able to connect via HTTP/S to partner systems, and without a new, reusable solution, they would need to develop a custom connector for every third-party connection that used RESTful communication. They required a flexible means to execute these requests without adding to their technical debt. Whatever the answer was, it needed to be scalable and affordable, and ultimately speed up the client’s integrations with new systems.

Solution Approach

To eliminate the need for custom coding for each partner connection, and thus increasing scalability, the solution was built on AWS Lambda using S3, SQS, API Gateway, and DynamoDB to power the connectivity. This also gave the customer greater control over the system because the solution could be throttled and tailored to each individual system. The serverless cloud model was more cost-effective than a traditional server architecture because the serverless service was only needed when there were active requests. This allowed the client to save significant cost by scaling down, especially after hours and on weekends when traffic is lower. This made it possible to scale up or down depending on demand while the company only paid for the compute time when the solution was active.

Results

The results for the customer have been staggering. Moving to a serverless cloud environment has reduced their OpEx spend 90% per customer. Because the solution is highly configurable, custom API development is no longer required for third-party RESTful connections. Since implementing the solution, more than 12 million custom HTTP/S requests have been executed, with no unhandled errors in processing.