Saving £137,000 a Year While Increasing Performance Using Amazon Cognito with DVSA

DVSA plays a significant role in supporting road safety across Great Britain. The agency carries out driving tests, manages vehicle safety through the Department for Transport (DfT), and oversees vehicle operator licensing. To fulfill these mandates, DVSA must securely and reliably authenticate users from about 150,000 organizations. It has been running about 30 workloads on AWS since 2016. However, it used another vendor for its authentication service. “Our prior solution had stability issues, cost issues, and challenges with new releases,” says Hare. Those issues kept the DVSA team tied down with laborious maintenance work. “For us, the problem was always authentication,” says Hare. “We would have an issue, but we didn’t know what the cause was. It was open ended.”

Although it was committed to finding a new solution, DVSA was operating under a tight deadline. If it missed the contract termination point, the agency would incur a 50 percent renewal fee from the provider of its legacy solution. DVSA needed to take a strategic approach to engineering the new offering if it was to deliver on time. “We split this project into two phases. First, we built out the core solution using Amazon Cognito,” says Hare. “The ease of use and flexibility of that approach meant that we delivered the first phase in 6 weeks.” After the first phase was complete, DVSA began to focus on distributing the offering across its many services. It connected the first of two services, vehicle operator licensing, to the new backend system in June 2022.
 

Within the first two hours of its implementation, over 70,000 people signed into the new DVSA authentication solution on one service alone. DVSA used AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, in combination with Amazon Cognito to migrate a total of 140,000 accounts on its vehicle operator licensing and MOT services. Because the change was seamless, users weren’t aware that the agency had just rolled out a new solution. “In other circumstances with a major migration of this type and this size, one would expect some degree of interruption,” says Hare. “But the degree was so low that it wasn’t noticeable to us.” The agency now uses Amazon Cognito as the default authentication system in its vehicle operator licensing system and the MOT testing system, with over 160,000 total users. And when DVSA implements upgrades to its solution, it no longer has to plan downtime.

In addition, the agency delivered a significant performance improvement using Amazon Cognito. “We’ve seen at least a 30 percent reduction in software release time,” says Hare. Moreover, releases can now go live during the day instead of at night, so team members no longer have to spend their evenings and weekends on call. The greater reliability of the new solution has also boosted morale. Previously, DVSA teams would often start up a development environment and wait 45 minutes for the technology stack to come up, only to find that authentication wasn’t working. Now the agency is enjoying a more consistent experience with the new tool. In total, DVSA is saving £137,000 a year on Amazon Cognito.

Flexibility was also a core concern for DVSA. Because the agency authorizes separate entities, such as haulage or bus companies, it wanted an authentication service for both individuals and business users. The agency found it simple to meet that dual need using Amazon Cognito. “When we were developing the new system, it didn’t feel like we were migrating such a big piece of our application,” says Joshua License, senior developer at DVSA. “We went from theory to a minimum viable product on Amazon Cognito by simply clicking a button on our console, and then we got to work.”

In addition to using Amazon Cognito, the DVSA also implemented Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it simple to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at scale. Instead of using bespoke code over and over again to verify that tokens are valid, the agency used Amazon API Gateway to simplify its authorization process. “We removed all our bespoke code and reduced our technical debt using Amazon API Gateway,” says License. “Now, we don’t have to worry about checking the tokens.”

DVSA teams are excited to be able to focus on developing new features that add value to the agency’s offering. “We used to have authentication issues reported to us every other week,” says License. “We no longer get those, which is an improvement.” And now that the team isn’t using a solution with multiple checks for session-based authentication tokens, page response time is 15 percent faster.