HyperTrack Uses AWS for Real-Time Data Processing for Live Location Tracking at Scale

HyperTrack is a self-serve cloud platform for live location tracking through apps. Tens of thousands of developers from various industries and regions use the managed service to track the real-time movement of their assets without building or managing their own infrastructure. “We make it as easy as possible for any developer to add live location tracking to their apps,” says Thomas Raffetseder, software architect at HyperTrack. “Developers add our SDK to their apps, and we provide accurate and real-time location data back to them in the cloud through their APIs. For instance, a leading oil and gas company uses an oil pumper app built with HyperTrack. It uses tracking data to understand how pumpers spend their time, and to make real-time routing decisions so they can be more productive.”

When it launched in late 2015, HyperTrack needed to build a platform that could scale automatically. “As a startup, we knew we would grow quickly and continue to grow, and we wanted to have infrastructure available to support us on a larger scale without us having to manage and maintain it ourselves,” says Raffetseder. HyperTrack also needed the ability to visualize data for millions of devices in the field and to notify customers when their business assets have arrived at a destination. “We had to provide that real-time location update, which is what our customers need,” Raffetseder says. “That was a use case we had to solve before we really rolled out our service to customers.”

To achieve these goals, HyperTrack developed a serverless platform on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It took advantage of AWS Lambda for serverless compute and Amazon Kinesis for ingesting the data streams from the company’s SDKs, processing them for accuracy, and making locations available for real-time features. “When we started, the question wasn’t if we should do cloud—it was which cloud,” says Raffetseder. “AWS had been the cloud computing leader for a long time, and it provides the maturity and cloud services we were looking for.”

HyperTrack also chose AWS AppSync to visualize real-time data for millions of devices. AWS AppSync simplifies development by enabling developers to create APIs that access and combine data from different sources. The service uses the GraphQL API query language for data flow to applications. “We needed the ability to support GraphQL in our pipeline for both front-end and mobile teams to consume,” says Raffetseder. “Instead of having to use our own proprietary format, we like what GraphQL provided as a standard, and AWS AppSync was the perfect choice to enable that.” Using AppSync, along with the AWS Amplify mobile development framework, HyperTrack is able to deliver millions of data points to its customers.

Without using AWS AppSync and Amplify, HyperTrack would have spent much more time trying to achieve real-time data processing. “We don’t have a dedicated operations team here, and we would have had to set this up from scratch and then try to forecast the load to make sure it all works under certain conditions,” says Raffetseder. “Using AWS AppSync, we had high confidence the service would work without an extreme level of additional operational overhead. We got our solution up and running in days instead of weeks.”

Relying on AWS serverless architecture, HyperTrack can scale up and down automatically without engineering intervention. “Using a serverless approach on AWS, our solution auto-scales by design, so we can just focus on the schema and how data is actually flowing through the clients,” says Raffetseder. “We don’t have to worry about actually managing the performance of a GraphQL server, so we were able to quickly scale to meet demand. We started with a new product with no users and we now have hundreds of millions of events on our platform. We could not have done that without AWS.”

Because HyperTrack does not spend time managing infrastructure, it can pay full attention to adding more value for customers. “No one is going to use HyperTrack because we have a great GraphQL server. They use us because we provide great value to their business,” says Raffetseder. “Using AWS AppSync and AWS serverless architecture, we have a fully managed service and we don’t have to worry about making the infrastructure more solid. As a result, we can do research on what our customers really care about. That means we have been able to focus on building awesome live location experiences for our product, which helps our customers build better businesses and product experiences for their customers.” 

In addition, HyperTrack is saving money by not needing to overprovision capacity for workloads. “We are seeing a 30 percent cost savings compared to the architecture we were using before we switched to serverless,” says Alexander Kishinevsky, vice president of engineering for HyperTrack. “A big part of that savings comes from not needing operational resources to focus on server management. That’s 40 hours of work we save, every single week. That’s significant for a startup like us, and it represents money we can put back into enhancing our product. By using AWS, we can put our efforts into giving our customers the best possible solution.”

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/appsync.