CASE STUDY
AutoPets
Building a Robust Infrastructure for an Enhanced IoT User Experience
Bringing Pet Care into the Future with IoT
AutoPets is an innovative pet care company looking to make pet care more enjoyable and convenient through the development of highly functional, connected pet products. Internationally known for the Litter-Robot, an automatic self-cleaning litter box for cats, AutoPets continues to develop creative IoT product solutions for its customers to reimagine petcare.
Industry
Challenge
Services & Tech
Improving App Speed & Reliability on AWS
While AutoPets leveraged AWS for their Litter-Robot product, the system did not use any managed services such as AWS IoT, which meant they weren’t getting the full benefits of a cloud native solution. The product’s software limitations also created a less-than-desirable app speed and unreliable system with performance inconsistencies and little room for scalability.
Creating a Better User Experience
Onboarding new units to the system was difficult for users, with only about 25 percent of people succeeding on the first try. Action response time also varied greatly between instantaneous and up to 45 seconds. AutoPets had already completed its iOS application and was preparing to launch its Android application. However, due to the user experience and onboarding issues they faced with the iOS application, the team was nervous about adding new Android users to the current application backend infrastructure.
Because of these reliability concerns and the upcoming deadlines around the new Android application, it was determined that they needed to engage an experienced AWS integrator. After looking to AWS for a recommendation, they got in touch with Premier Consulting Partner Onica.
Improving Stability and Cost Savings on AWS
The Onica team came aboard and delivered within a tight timeline for AutoPets. The first priority was completing IoT firmware for the new generation of the Litter-Robot, which needed to go through various hardware certifications. The second priority was a successful Android application launch. The approach was aggressive, with the team needing to meet their firmware deadline within 45 days from the start date.
The AutoPets team’s number one goal was stabilizing their AWS infrastructure in order to ensure the Android app could launch without experiencing the onboarding issues they had with their iOS launch. In addition, some updates to the hardware were necessary so the AWS IoT service could be used natively. This included designing the provisioning and onboarding process, implementing the communications firmware, building the cloud infrastructure for native use, and updating the existing iOS application, as well as the initial work on the Android application to ensure interfacing with the new device was successful. The results were instant.
Accounting for Legacy While Planning for the Future
The biggest challenge the AutoPets team faced was around its legacy devices. Since the Litter-Robot is already in the customers’ homes and can’t be updated (there are no over-the-air-updates in V1.0 of Litter-Robot Connect), there were major challenges around what could be done to improve and update legacy hardware. This was described by the team as “changing the wheel of a car while it’s driving 60 mph,” as it was important that changes to the infrastructure were made incrementally without disrupting service to existing customers.
The existing infrastructure was built with Amazon EC2 instances that supported the legacy devices, and therefore had to remain. However, the team was able to add automation to improve scalability and modernize and streamline infrastructure for existing devices to create a more efficient use of AWS services; this improved costs by storing messages in Amazon DynamoDB and provisioning with Amazon API Gateway.
For everything built new, the focus was on managed services and serverless development. The process began with AWS IoT Core and rules engine for basic data ingestion. Amazon Kinesis streams were used to buffer data and AWS Lambda was used to process data. As with the old infrastructure, data was stored in Amazon DynamoDB for long-term storage. Short of the requirements for legacy devices, there are no servers involved in the new process.
OUTCOMES
Greater Reliability & Scalability with Lower Costs
WHY US
Why Onica
Onica is one of the largest and fastest-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partners in the world, helping companies enable, operate, and innovate in the cloud. From migration strategy to operational excellence and immersive transformation, Onica is a full spectrum AWS integrator. Learn more at www.onica.com.