How Noggin Speeds Up and Simplifies Crisis Management on AWS

You might have heard the story before. But when it came time for Noggin to re-platform, we adopted an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-first approach. That approach guaranteed us reliability, security, and ease of use in our integrated safety, security, and critical event management platform.

In fact, we architected using a distributed microservices approach: Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS); a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications for the compute layer, and Amazon DynamoDB ,a fast, flexible NoSQL database service for single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3); an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance, for our storage layers. These services give us the ability to pull together tons of relevant content, add it to our library, and release it to our customers immediately.

What’s more, AWS services also allow us to instantly scale horizontally as demand grows – and, of course, back down again when demand recedes. Without this autoscaling capability, we would be running around organising infrastructure, not doing what we should be doing, i.e., building powerful solutions quickly to help people when they need it most.

That capability has come in handy. For instance, during last year’s Atlantic Hurricane Season, American Red Cross needed to scale the use of our platform significantly to support thousands of new users on its site requiring information and resources. In the words of our Chief Product Officer, Charlie Forsyth: “Previously, we didn’t have auto scaling capabilities. Moving to AWS means we can scale all of our application layers on demand to support significant traffic spikes.”

Other customers have benefited from the platform’s improved scalability too. Upon successfully implementing Noggin 2.0 at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Nick van Pooss, manager of Security and Emergency Management at QUT, said that the new system is “a 100 percent improvement over what we had.”

To say AWS is a core tenant of our software philosophy here at Noggin would be an understatement. And so, if you are keen to learn more about how we partner with AWS to provide customers with reliable, user-friendly software that scales, read the Noggin-AWS case study, here.