C-all: A cloud native IoT app for managing service stations

Sometimes architecting a cloud solution can seem easy. But what if that application grows exponentially and new features are added continuously. Will your design be resilient enough to grow and adapt? This is a story all about how a small idea exploded into a full blown, cloud-native web app with a highly scalable data ingestion pipeline.

During the past few years, vBridge assisted its sister company AAtechnics in becoming a leader in predictive maintenance of service stations. Together, we built the C-all platform, a cloud native web app for managing service stations. By combining all sensory data into one platform, they are setting the new standard for easy management of hundreds of service stations.

Every month, their C-all monitoring platform captures millions of realtime signals from thousands of devices in unmanned retail locations. These signals are processed and stored in Google Cloud and made available to end users through a custom built web app. When anomalies are detected, alarms are raised to quickly notify maintainers of the problem. By combining all of the data into one platform, a complete and in-depth view of a service station is made possible.

These alarms allow owners or site operators to fix problems much more efficiently. Custom AI pipelines even predict failures before they are noticed. As a result, the time for technicians to resolve issues dropped dramatically, the customer experience has improved greatly, and the ecological footprint of service stations went down significantly.

From a cloud infrastructure perspective, vBridge was involved in the whole process: from design to implementation of the application and architecting it’s scalable cloud infrastructure. The data ingestion pipeline we engineered uses a combination of kubernetes clusters, serverless components and different database systems to store and process all incoming data. We leveraged cloud native components to unlock the full potential of the platform we’re building on, Google Cloud Platform.

The challenge was to build a setup that works for 10, 100 or even thousands of service stations without having to re-engineer everything. Every component was judged for its ability to scale and allow for failure of any upstream component to ensure resilience while keeping cost in check. Increasing the reliability of data ingestion at every step.

These principles were battle tested while rolling out over hundreds of service stations in a couple of months. The architecture was allowing for a quick growth in data ingestion and processing while making sure the data is fresh when viewed. A couple of numbers to illustrate the current load:

The challenge was to build a setup that works for 10, 100 or even thousands of service stations without having to re-engineer everything. Every component was judged for its ability to scale and allow for failure of any upstream component to ensure resilience while keeping cost in check. Increasing the reliability of data ingestion at every step.

These principles were battle tested while rolling out over hundreds of service stations in a couple of months. The architecture was allowing for a quick growth in data ingestion and processing while making sure the data is fresh when viewed. A couple of numbers to illustrate the current load:

The C-all customer base is now expanding throughout Europe, and as vBridge, we are proud to be part of this incredible journey.