The Public Safety Council Corp (PSC) is a third-party facilitator of infrastructure, tools, resources, and approved solutions that supports a whole-of-society approach to community safety as outlined in the Community Safety Standard for Buildings. The goal of PSC is to enable the continuum of public safety, without compromising privacy rights or civil liberties. PSC is not an agency of any government Authority. PSC is a trusted third-party intermediary comprised of experienced community-minded professionals focused on addressing operational gaps by creating resources and next-generation tools.
Challenge:
In order to reach a wider audience, PSC decided to develop a mobile application to promote public safety that would alert citizens of on going live police and fire incidents within their vicinity. LefeWare Solutions was hired exclusively to build the “Swivel” mobile app and web based dashboards for administrating the app.
Challenge:
In order to reach a wider audience, PSC decided to develop a mobile application to promote public safety that would alert citizens of on going live police and fire incidents within their vicinity. LefeWare Solutions was hired exclusively to build the “Swivel” mobile app and web based dashboards for administrating the app.
Company Information
- Company Name: Public Safety Council
- Company Size: 2-10 employees
- Company Location: Ottawa, ON
- Industry: Public Safety
- Website: https://www.publicsafetycouncil.org/
Services Rendered
- Cloud Security
- DevOps
- Machine Learning Services
- Cloud Native Development
- Mobile App Development
Brief Summary of Results
- Published mobile app to Google Play Store
- Published mobile app to Apple Play Store
- Decreased server downtime by switching to Elastic Kubernetes Service
- Used web scraping and Natural Languge Processing to extract incident types and locations
- Deployed multiple containerized microservices to AWS
LefeWare Solutions Added Value
Due to tight deadlines and minimal project budget, LefeWare Solutions’s team decided on using a cross platform technology that would allow for writing one code base to publish for both Apple and Android. React Native was decided due to its ease of use, component reusability, and many popular native libraries. The app used several of the underlying native capabilities such as push notifications for alerts and geo location for user radius incident vicinity calculations.
In addition to building the mobile app, LefeWare Solutions was also responsible for building out all backend web based apps and services required by the mobile app. This included scraping twitter and department websites for ongoing live events, natural language processing for cleaning the data and understanding locations. The services were built using “microservice” architecture, and were containerized to ensure cloud native compatibility.
LefeWare Solutions took on the responsibility of hosting the applications within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. They utilized several AWS services to support the application infrastructure.
Application Hosting
To host and scale the applications according to the increasing demand, LefeWare Solutions relied on Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. By utilizing EKS, the organization can easily manage the containerized application workloads, dynamically allocate resources, and scale the infrastructure to meet the growing needs of the application.
Data Storage
In terms of data storage, LefeWare Solutions opted for a combination of Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) and DynamoDB. Amazon RDS offers managed relational databases that are highly scalable, reliable, and performant. It allows the organization to store structured data efficiently and benefit from features such as automatic backups, automated software patching, and replication for high availability. Additionally, DynamoDB, a NoSQL database service provided by AWS, was used for storing non-relational data. DynamoDB offers seamless scalability, low latency, and automatic data replication across multiple availability zones, making it suitable for handling large amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data.
Service to Service Communication
For service-to-service communication, they leveraged Amazon MQ, a managed message broker service that provides reliable messaging between distributed applications. This choice ensures efficient and secure communication between different components of the application architecture.
Application Hosting
To host and scale the applications according to the increasing demand, LefeWare Solutions relied on Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. By utilizing EKS, the organization can easily manage the containerized application workloads, dynamically allocate resources, and scale the infrastructure to meet the growing needs of the application.
Data Storage
In terms of data storage, LefeWare Solutions opted for a combination of Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) and DynamoDB. Amazon RDS offers managed relational databases that are highly scalable, reliable, and performant. It allows the organization to store structured data efficiently and benefit from features such as automatic backups, automated software patching, and replication for high availability. Additionally, DynamoDB, a NoSQL database service provided by AWS, was used for storing non-relational data. DynamoDB offers seamless scalability, low latency, and automatic data replication across multiple availability zones, making it suitable for handling large amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data.
Service to Service Communication
For service-to-service communication, they leveraged Amazon MQ, a managed message broker service that provides reliable messaging between distributed applications. This choice ensures efficient and secure communication between different components of the application architecture.
