ParkMan Improves Parking App Performance with AWS Partner Eficode Using Amazon EC2

As part of its mission to make parking easy for both individuals and businesses, ParkMan needed to make sure that its app for finding and paying for parking spaces was fast, accurate, and up to date. This meant ensuring that it was making optimal use of its resources on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Working with AWS Partner Eficode, ParkMan found a cost-effective and efficient way to connect its services to the internet using APIs. It also improved the performance of its IT infrastructure, and moved to containerized applications so it can scale quickly and reduce costs.

Based in Finland, ParkMan provides a digital platform to help individuals and businesses manage their car-parking needs on city streets, in parking garages and surface lots, and at airports and harbors. It has used AWS since shortly after it was founded in 2011 and has added many services as it has grown and expanded its operations to over 1 million users across several countries.

After one of its cloud engineers left the company, ParkMan decided to seek support from a third-party provider rather than replace that employee. The company reasoned that it could benefit from an outside perspective on its cloud infrastructure, and chose AWS Partner Eficode based on its expertise and good reputation in Finland. “We had a couple of pain points in our infrastructure at that point,” says Mikko Juurmaa, one of ParkMan’s co founders. “Our AWS resources were not as organized as they could have been, and we wanted to get an outsider to validate if we were doing things in the right way.”

Working with an outside partner gave ParkMan access to a team of cloud specialists with knowledge on wide range of topics. The company hoped that Eficode could provide some guidance for a few months and help it make decisions about how to streamline and manage its AWS resources for greater efficiency. But the collaboration ended up lasting for a year and a half because of the benefits ParkMan saw as Eficode guided it through a review of its cloud usage and helped it make numerous improvements.

ParkMan’s first priority was to find a better way to manage how it exposed its services to the internet. The company had been using a third-party provider to handle some of these tasks, but that system was not open source, making it costly to use.

ParkMan had also set up some of its own APIs to make calls using Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. But the company’s IT team found it complicated to use both AWS and the third-party software at once to manage its APIs. Working with Eficode, ParkMan was able to bring the management for all of its services connections onto Amazon API Gateway, which eliminated confusion. “It integrates so well with everything else in our system and has allowed us to save both time and money,” says Juurmaa.

Next, Eficode helped ParkMan to conduct an AWS Well-Architected review, which helps to build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. “Through the AWS Well-Architected review, we were able to fix our processes for deploying new code and managing cloud infrastructure,” Juurmaa says.

With its focus on six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability—the review identified opportunities to save costs and make sure ParkMan had the right tools for monitoring its systems and receiving timely alerts if any metrics indicate problems in its cloud infrastructure performance.

With Eficode’s guidance, ParkMan was also able to consolidate multiple separate databases using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. By migrating them onto a single Amazon RDS instance, the company can more easily allocate and manage its database resources and perform queries across multiple database schemas.

In addition, ParkMan has improved efficiency by moving from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity, to AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. This helps the company save costs because it now pays only for the services it uses. “The autoscaling feature has been very good,” Juurmaa says. “It makes sure the capacity scales according to our usage.”

ParkMan made additional improvements by optimizing how it uses AWS resources and manages its continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. “Eficode helped us to solve some key problems that we knew we had,” says Juurmaa. “They not only helped with making the most optimal conclusions and decisions, but also with the implementation.”

Throughout the engagement, the Eficode team shared its knowledge, helping ParkMan learn how to get the most out of AWS. The parking company also benefited from Eficode’s straightforward advice. For example, when ParkMan asked about adding new technologies that might not be needed, Eficode’s cloud architect was “able to put the business needs first and ask why we would do that,” Juurmaa says. “It was good to aid us in the right business decisions.”

All of the improvements that ParkMan has made have resulted in better services for its customers. “When we see something is going wrong, we can react fast, and that has impacted customers directly,” says Juurmaa. “We are experiencing less downtime and latency, which is extremely important to us.”