CONFEORG succeeds in launching a public virtual platform with AWS

The Colombian National Confederation of Traffic Support Organizations (Confederación Nacional de Organismos de Apoyo al Tránsito - CONFEORG) is a non-profit entity that brings together and represents the organizations that support traffic authorities—companies that provide traffic-related services in Colombia such as medical and psychometric aptitude exams, automotive education courses for aspiring drivers, mechanical reviews, vehicle emissions, and courses on traffic regulations. One of the organization’s main objectives is to contribute to the improvement of road safety in the country. In 2020, CONFEORG worked on the creation and implementation of a technological platform to centralize information on the services provided by support organizations, and offer a direct contact channel between users and service providers.

 

CONFEORG's goal was to launch, manage, maintain, and improve an application that would allow citizens to carry out searches based on georeferencing to choose and schedule services such as driving courses, physical and mental aptitude, and motor coordination tests to obtain and/or endorse driver's licenses, technical mechanical and emissions reviews for vehicles, and courses on traffic regulations for offenders. In addition, the platform had to comply with the high availability and scalability standards required by the SIC, and have the option of scheduling and booking appointments through online transactions. Another of CONFEORG's main challenges was to continue to guarantee transparency in the market and to ensure all support organizations were visible to the public through the implementation of technological tools within the sector.

 

“When we began to assess the different platforms, really from the pre-sale stage, we received very good support from AWS”, Juan Camilo Rojas says about the reasons for choosing AWS.  Another reason they didn’t hesitate to partner with IKTINUS and AWS was the budget, and the projection that guaranteed production of the platform just when they needed it, with the resources they were looking for and with the required scalability potential and availability.

 

"From the regulatory standpoint, availability is paramount; we must comply with the obligation established by the SIC to have 98.5% availability of the platform," says Juan Camilo. Therefore, the CONFEORG developer team, with the guidance of the AWS team, agreed to build the platform with a modular architecture, using microservices that involved decoupling the frontend from the database without a backend server. This, in turn, improved agility by reducing the time and resources required to test, build, deploy, scale, and maintain applications. More importantly, the availability figure that was achieved met and exceeded the 98.5% mandate, and the scalability reached the capacity to serve 50,000 users in an hour without losing a single transaction, thanks to the services integrated into the platform, such as Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon API Gateway.

 

As a result, PAO (Support Platform for Support Organizations for Traffic Authorities) was born, a technological application for information management that allows road stakeholders to freely choose and democratize services related to traffic procedures. The agility of both IKTINUS and AWS's internal resources was decisive in carrying out the project and meeting the customer's objectives. In the words of the project leader at CONFEORG, Juan Camilo: "Despite the short time to develop the project, the will and commitment of all parties made it possible, and mainly thanks to AWS, we now have a solution that is scalable and profitable at the same time."

 

Thanks to the work with AWS and IKTINUS, the preliminary SROI estimates are promising. The PAO tool is already helping its two main target audiences: support organizations for traffic authorities and Colombian citizens. The centers will be able to achieve greater reach and Colombians will be able to carry out their transactions without waiting in line and without delays, and will be able to go to the provider that suits their needs.

 

"The idea in the near future is for all Colombian citizens to use our services, either to find a support organization or to obtain information on the necessary procedures," says Rojas.

 

Additionally, although the PAO platform belongs to a non-profit entity, CONFEORG foresees a future in which it is self-sustaining, and for that they plan to continue with AWS services. "The platform is going to be free for five years, but we want the same platform to generate income in the future so that it can continue to work, and to achieve that we are exploring more AWS services such as AWS Amplify and everything related to DevOPs", notes Juan Camilo, and indicates that they will continue working hand in hand with IKTINUS and AWS to achieve their ongoing goals, in accordance with the obligations which have already been established or will be imposed in future by the SIC and other authorities in the sector.