Build a Safe, Reliable Ride-Hailing Service for Women on AWS with Wilma

Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wilma is North America’s first women-driving-women ride-hailing service. It uses a subscription-based model to create a safe, trusting community of riders and drivers. “Our goal is to be in 170 cities in the next 5 years,” says Terri Phipps, cofounder and CEO of Wilma. “We needed to set up the right long-term infrastructure to do that successfully.”

Wilma first relied on a template-based service to support its front end, while its backend infrastructure was hosted on a server farm. As it grew, Wilma required more robust front-end and backend infrastructure. So, it built its own mobile front end using React Native, an open-source mobile framework, and engaged AWS for a backend infrastructure solution in 2022.

On AWS, Wilma can scale based on consumer demand and business needs while continuing to adopt and contribute to open-source technologies such as Node.js, Fastify, and Platformatic. By using serverless technologies like AWS Lambda, an event-driven compute service; Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed key-value NoSQL database; and a fully
event-driven architecture based on services like Amazon EventBridge, a serverless event bus, Wilma can prioritize the delivery of new features instead of managing a system with high operational costs. It provisions infrastructure automatically with HashiCorp Terraform and can scale across multiple regions without introducing downtime. “Every second of cloud
usage is optimized so that the infrastructure is as cost effective as it can be,” says Phipps. “On AWS, Wilma has the flexibility to scale. By embracing HashiCorp Terraform, there’s virtually no limit to how quickly we can expand without falling into vendor locking.”

Because Wilma must manage location data for every second of every ride, all data needs to be protected. With services like Amazon Cognito, which facilitates secure, frictionless customer identity and access management, and the embedded security model that every AWS service includes, Wilma can protect the privacy of all personally identifiable data. It also adopted AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), a service that is used to create and control keys used to encrypt or digitally sign data, to encrypt data in transit and at rest.