Regular readers of our posts will already know of Gaia Resources involvement in the development of the Essential Services Volunteers app previously this year. If not, there’s a case study that we’ve been working on with our partners in this, Amazon Web Services (which you can also see by clicking on the image below).

AWS Case Study

AWS Summary Slide

An extract from the case study is below:

Late last year, we answered a call from the Association of Volunteer Bushfire Brigades of Western Australia, who were seeking a partner to help develop a proof of concept mobile app and web site that would support the volunteers fighting bushfires around WA. Then, in early 2020, funding became available to develop a much more fully-featured product, resulting in the Essential Service Volunteers (ESV) app, which was launched back in April.

Bushfire Volunteers WA worked closely with us to create a smartphone app that helps emergency services volunteers register, track activities, and access local merchant offers. The app:

• empowers volunteers to track activities for medical and employment reimbursement
• enables offline use with the ability to sync data when users go online again, and
• created an app with utility for all public emergency services

Our CEO, Piers Higgs, was quoted as saying:

Our hope is that this app will make the lives of bushfire volunteers easier and be adopted broadly throughout various public service agencies across Australia. Using the power of the AWS Cloud enables us to do so with security, scalability, and cost-efficiency that would not be possible any other way.

Being an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, our team chose to build the app on the AWS Cloud. Using AWS means Bushfire Volunteers WA doesn’t have to manage infrastructure or pay for more capacity than it needs, and because bushfires are largely seasonal, it’s a solution that can scale up as volunteer brigades need to use it, and then scale back down again when the needs are less urgent.

Our implementation relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide image and object storage, and uses Amazon CloudFront to speed content delivery. In addition, AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles web app deployment, including capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and app health monitoring, further reducing management overhead for both Gaia Resources and the Association. The app also takes advantage of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for foundational compute services and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL for fully managed database service.

You can read more about our AWS strategy in recent blogs here and here and if you’d like to know more then please drop angus.mackay@gaiaresources.com.au a line, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Alex