Welcome to 'This is My Architecture'.
I am Hawn, from AWS, and today
I have Chad from PayGo.
- Welcome, Chad, and thank you for joining us. - Thank you very much.
So before we get into your architecture,
can you tell me a little bit about PayGo?
Yeah, you bet. Are you familiar with pre-paid cellphones
- or smartphones? - Yeah.
PayGo does exactly the same thing,
but for utilities for your house.
Our application allows customers to see
near real-time usage information
- and make payments. - Awesome.
So, let's just say I am a customer of PayGo.
Can you walk me through the flow?
Absolutely. So, the first thing that you're going to do
is visit your utility branded website.
You can do that on your smartphone or any device
that will reach the internet.
Once you're there, you're going to take a look at data
that's provided by our EC2 system.
If you need to make a payment, for example,
let's say your balance is a little low,
you're going to make a payment through the web portal.
That information goes to the actual utility company.
Once the utility company receives that,
they're going to communicate with a meter
on your house.
If the meter on your house is disconnected,
it'll turn on in about 25 seconds.
That is awesome. So, walk me through, like,
in terms of payment, how does that flow work?
You bet. There's a couple different methods,
we just discussed how you can do it on the web portal,
we also have a patented process called CheckOut.
Wow. What CheckOut allows customers to do
is they can receive a bar code on their mobile phone
or on their actual paper utility bill.
They'll take that bar code to a participating retailer,
such as Walgreens or CVS or any of the other
participating retailers,
scan the bar code, business rules will check
a variety of things: are you still a customer,
can you make a payment, you're not making a payment
that's too large.
Once those business rules have been evaluated,
that payment is going to go into our system
and once more it will flow to the utility company
and then affect the meter that actually
exists on your house.
Once the payment is made, you get a real time notice
on your mobile device, in the case
you happen to have that with you.
So how do you persist all this data, how is that managed?
You bet. All of that is managed inside of our
environment and our application ecosystem that resides
in EC2.
A lot of meter data is managed by
the utility company, but the actual payment processing
runs through our patented process
inside of AWS.
Awesome. So I've noticed that you have
the data base on EC2 there. Yes.
I'm not seeing an RDS, can you tell me why?
You bet, yeah, the answer is history.
So when we first took a look at AWS,
what we discovered is that we were using features
that RDS did not support at that time.
Our only option was to run SQL Server
on a Windows operating system inside AWS.
We took a look at the other major cloud providers too,
guess what, they couldn't do it, AWS was the only place
that we could go.
So how do you maintain the high availability
disaster recovery with this?
Yeah, great questions.
What you see here, in the EC2 and the data base,
this is one half of a two-sided stack.
There is this stack and each of an availability zone
inside a region, that provides our high availability.
Over here with S3, we're backing-up all the data
to S3, that data then
is cross-region replicated over to another region,
that's the irreplaceable part, we can build instances,
which we would do, we can spin those up in load balancers,
but we can't turn on DR without that data.
Over in DR, we also have a double-sided stack as well,
for high availability.
So it must be a manual process that you're running today.
Yes, some of the pieces are manual
and we hope to make that better in the future.
- So what's next for PayGo? - Yeah, thanks.
So, first off, we would really like to use
more of AWS' native services.
AWS has a global reach, which is wonderful for us
because in case we go globally,
AWS can support that.
We're going to move from the SQL Server
on an operating system over to RDS
and we would also like to get into a lot of architecture,
sorry, infrastructure automation and orchestration.
Right now it takes a few days to build an environment,
with that, as you know, we can move that from days
down to hours.
That's phenomenal, so, thank you so much
for going over your architecture,
that's very awesome, how you're able to enable
the utilities with just the click of a button
- from your mobile, so thank you. - You bet.
And thank you for watching 'This is My Architecture'.