People in Need Provides Lifesaving Early-Storm-Warning System Using AWS People in Need is using AWS to scale an early warning system in Cambodia that alerts about 400,000 subscribers when floods threaten. Based in the Czech Republic, People in Need is a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization engaged in humanitarian and development work in more than 20 countries. The People in Need early warning system runs both sensor technology and an open-source IVR solution using Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing. Company People in Need Industry Nonprofit Organization Country Czech Republic Employees 1,000 Deadly Rains breach their banks during each rainy Website www.clovekvtisni.cz/en August is always wet in Cambodia—the season. The result: significant flooding month comes in the middle of the country’s afflicts Cambodia almost every year. early rainy season—but in August 2011 This circumstance has bedeviled this area the monsoon rains turned heavier and for as long as people have lived there. In more relentless than usual. Eventually, About People in Need the 1300s, a massive flood may even have floodwaters inundated 18 of the country’s contributed to the collapse of the ancient People in Need (PIN) is a nongovernmental, 25 provinces. Khmer city state of Angkor, despite the nonprofit organization that operates By the time the floods receded that fact that its intricately designed water- humanitarian projects in about 20 countries. December, about 1.2 million people management infrastructure was then the The Czech Republic–based organization had been affected, including more than most advanced in the world. works to break cycles of poverty and 45,000 families who had to flee their disaster, especially by deploying IT Clearly, flooding will always be a fact of life homes. Dozens of miles of rural roads solutions. in Cambodia. But that doesn’t mean steps had been swept away, cutting off remote can’t be taken to reduce the dangers it communities, and there was widespread poses. The visionary architects of Angkor damage to buildings and infrastructure. attempted to do so with the fourteenth Benefits Worst of all: About 250 people had century’s best available technology and • Achieved scalability to protect 400,000 drowned. expertise. What might twenty-first-century potential flood victims A Long History of Floods technology and expertise be able to add to • Avoided the capital cost of provisioning Those 250 deaths are a grim reckoning the story? traditional data center resources by any measure, but even grimmer is the • Protected solution from local disasters Fifteen Minutes to Live fact that the 2011 floods are not the worst People in Need (PIN) wanted to find out. A Cambodia has experienced. They aren’t Czech Republic–based nongovernmental, even the worst in recent memory: flooding nonprofit organization that operates AWS Services Used in 2000 affected close to 3 million people humanitarian projects in about 20 • Amazon EC2 and left 374 dead. countries, People in Need had been looking • Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Fully 75 percent of Cambodia lies inside the for ways to help Cambodia reduce the • Elastic Load Balancing floodplains of the Tonle Sap—the largest harm of frequent flooding ever since it • Auto Scaling lake in Southeast Asia—the Mekong River, arrived in the country in 2008. In 2013, in • AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the Tonle Sap River, which routinely partnership with the European Commission The People in Need early warning system will scale with AWS Elastic Beanstalk to protect about 400,000 people. for Humanitarian Aid and Open Institute, PIN But what would be the best way to deliver the began work on Building Disaster Resilient emergency warnings to Cambodians’ mobile Communities, a project to help Cambodian phones? A combination of low literacy levels communities move from a reactive to a and the difficulties of rendering Khmer script proactive stance toward flooding and other on phone screens made SMS messaging a disasters. poor option. Prerecorded voice messages offered a solution, but that presented an “With the effects of climate change already obstacle as well: the cost of commercially being felt in the country, resilience in the face available interactive voice response (IVR) of extreme weather events is only going to solutions. become more vital,” says James Happell, an innovations manager for PIN, who explains With the assistance of Open Institute, PIN that project goals included risk-reduction worked to develop an emergency warning training and planning, strengthening delivery platform. PIN has added to this infrastructure, and introducing more platform over time, most recently by working sustainable agricultural techniques. with a local developer on a custom-built, hosted, open-source IVR platform called Worthy goals all, but necessarily long-term. Somleng, which—when used with RapidPro, As PIN considered how the goal of disaster an open source call-flow manager—can be resilience could be advanced in the short term used to transmit recorded voice messages to through technology solutions, it identified preselected groups of mobile phones, such as some low-hanging fruit: according to a study all of those in an area threatened by a weather- performed after a 2011 floods, 36 percent of related emergency. Cambodians had received no government warnings or other emergency information; of The big remaining question was where to host “Without AWS, we those who did receive warnings, 72 percent the solution, which PIN named EWS 1294. “For simply couldn’t received them too late to take action. “The sad past projects, we’ve hosted our solutions in thing is that so many flood-related deaths are collocated data centers, but we weren’t thrilled afford to provide this avoidable,” Happell says. “Just 15 minutes’ at that prospect for this project,” says Happell, warning can be enough to allow people going on to explain that EWS solutions require lifesaving service to seek higher ground, and oftentimes it’s the ability to scale up and down dramatically for the people of possible to predict these events hours or even during emergencies. “With an EWS system, days in advance.” you might need almost no resources almost all year long, then suddenly you’ll need to be able Cambodia.” Even before the community-level to send out tens of thousands of messages transformations envisioned by the project James Happell as quickly as possible. Achieving those Innovations Manager, People in Need could come to pass, PIN realized many lives capabilities in a traditional data center is an might be saved each rainy season by providing expensive proposition, and a local data center timely warnings. The only problem to solve could be affected by the same emergencies was how to get the warnings to the people we’d be trying to warn people about.” who need them. In June 2016, People in Need turned to the An Early Warning System on AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud for the As PIN considered possible solutions to this scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient hosting problem, the organization recognized that the it needed for its EWS 1294 solution. During country’s expanding mobile-phone networks emergencies, the solution uses AWS Elastic could be used to deliver messages as part of Beanstalk, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load a Cambodian early warning system. “Many Balancing to automatically scale up Amazon Cambodians live a relatively low-tech lifestyle, Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) On- with a lot of rural communities lacking even Demand instances. In addition to Amazon RDS landline phone connections,” says Happell. for PostgreSQL for deploying and managing “Mobile phones are the exception: almost PostgreSQL instances, the solution includes everyone has one.” third-party, open-source software such as FreeSWITCH telephony software and the People in Need has also developed a flood Adhearsion telephony application framework. detection unit to detect dangerous water With the redundant AWS global architecture, levels at the source. Designed by Robert the solution is highly available and protected Ryan-Silva from DAI in the United States and from local disasters. with funding from the USAID Development Innovations project, Tepmachcha is a solar- “AWS services are really vital to the solution,” powered, GSM-enabled, sonar-based stream says Happell. “We’ve already had to send out gauge, built on open-source technology. At about 30,000 messages in response to one predetermined intervals, the device uses sonar storm, and it would have taken much longer detection to measure the height of the water without the capabilities of Elastic Beanstalk.” at its location and sends this data over the Scaling with the AWS Cloud cellular phone network back to a centralized The flexible, on-demand, scalability available web dashboard. If dangerous water levels on AWS will be even more crucial as the are detected, the system automatically sends service grows. “We have about 50,000 out a mobile alert message to people in the subscribers in six Cambodian provinces now, affected areas. Happell says that, in a future but we are projecting about 80,000 by the end phase of the project, he will evaluate using of 2017 and are planning to be active in all the services such as AWS Greengrass and AWS flood-prone reaches around the Mekong and IoT, which will relieve IoT developers of the Tonle Sap by the end of 2018,” says Happell. need to manually map sensor IP addresses He explains that the solution could effectively to virtual machines or the backend of cover an additional 320,000 people who live applications—and not only for EWS 1294. in subscribers’ households. “The powerful “With AWS, the sky is really the limit for scalability available on AWS could help us technology solutions to age-old problems,” protect as many as 400,000 people from says Happell.