MAPID Helps Indonesia Strengthen Its Flood Management Systems Using AWS

As a low-lying coastal city, Jakarta in Indonesia regularly floods when heavy rains and high tides coincide, often causing severe disruption. To improve flood management, some government agencies across the world have identified geographic information systems (GIS) as one of the best ways to monitor water levels in flood-prone areas, so they can better predict when an overflow will occur in order to take necessary action. However, Bagus Imam Darmawan, chief executive officer of MAPID, identified that government agencies in Indonesia didn’t have the skillsets or resources to operate their own GIS, so he decided to launch MAPID’s GIS as a service on the cloud.

MAPID chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) which allowed the company to access the computing power it needed without the prohibitive costs of building a data center. Darmawan says, “AWS understood that we had to process data in a highly cost-effective way and simplify processes such as scaling and application deployment to focus on enhancing services.”

To maximize the performance of MAPID’s applications while keeping costs down, the startup uses AWS Lambda functions, which run code without the need for provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda functions are triggered by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets where pre-processed data collected on rainfall from local weather stations, for example, are processed and stored. MAPID also uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which automatically handles code deployments, including auto-scaling and load balancing. Darmawan comments, “Keeping expenses in check is vital for a startup, and AWS is enabling us to develop our services without costs getting out of control.”

With MAPID’s service up and running on AWS, Indonesia’s Ministry of Public Works contacted MAPID via its website to license the GIS solution for a flood management project. MAPID then created a map of flooded areas in Jakarta based on data from local weather stations and social media posts from city residents. Ministry staff accessed the map, which was updated daily, via a portal built using application programming interfaces (APIs). Looking ahead, MAPID now plans to integrate artificial intelligence services from AWS into its service for predictive capabilities. Darmawan says, “With AWS we could get to a level of predictability that would buy our customers precious time.”

The diagram below illustrates the AWS infrastructure at MAPID:

To learn more, visit Data Lakes and Analytics on AWS.