The Challenge
Ibexlabs, an AWS Consulting Partner, has been collaborating with 4SITE to create a cloud-native asset management platform that meets the following requirements:
- The ability to capture and process the large volume of data from a typical deployment of thousands of sensors, in as close to real-time as possible;
- The ability to support different types of assets and building configurations, without excessive customization;
- The ability for a business to quickly and easily set up and run the 4SITE platform;
- The ability to provide secure, robust and performant operations; and
- Conform to the best practices of the 5 pillars in the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
The Ibexlabs Solution
The 4SITE platform captures data from a large number of wireless sensors deployed on assets in a business workspace — the conference rooms, offices, desks and workstations on each floor of a building. The data is fed, aggregated and analyzed by the 4SITE analytics platform to create reports on resource utilization. Users can create utilization reports anytime with specific parameters such as a building, a floor, a room, and even a workstation to show how much of a space or resource is being utilized during any period.
The Ibexlabs solution uses a number of AWS services for the 4SITE platform. The heart of the solution is a serverless application built using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), with AWS Lambda providing a highly scalable, high throughput processing of the sensor data and AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage. Additional support comes from the AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS) for asynchronous message transport between the microservices making up the application, AWS EC2 for on-demand compute capacity, AWS managed services for hosting the platform, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for role-based access control.
