Outages are painful. No one wants to see a blank screen while attempting to access critical services and applications. Unfortunately, that’s what happened last month when thousands of people attempted to reach their favorite streaming services – Hulu, Apple TV, and HBO Max all experienced service disruption. On Thursday April 21st 2022 there was a broad outage that affected many networks.
To our alarm, we were also affected by this outage between 2:15 and 3:35 UTC on April 21st, as we see in the screenshot of our monitoring tool below.
Notice how traffic is flat when the outage started, and then we see uptick in the incoming traffic once the internet recovered. During this outage, SDK users were tracked as expected and once internet connectivity got restored, we received data as designed. This ability to maintain continuity during disruption is extremely important – especially in the last mile delivery space.
Our customers handle last mile delivery for the largest brands in the world. From wine delivery and groceries to home cleaning services and gig work, our customers depend on us for the infrastructure that allows them to deliver on time and feed critical operations data to management teams. Key activities like distance based pay outs and on time delivery notifications are supported using HyperTrack. Companies use our logistics APIs, SDKs, webhooks and embed ops views to improve their operations as they grow with the benefit of logistics aware data and workflows.
For this reason, we need to ensure system stability is a leading principle guiding our engineering decisions. While everyone does their best to avoid outages, we understand that they do occur. So it is best to have a preventative approach and the foresight to build resilient systems that withstand disruptions when they happen.
This is the approach with our SDK. The HyperTrack SDK is designed for mobile app developers who are building logistics technology for on-demand use cases. Our customers use these SDKs to assign work, validate accurate payouts, and facilitate on-time deliveries. Our customers span industries and business models, but their need for uptime and stability is one requirement that they all have in common.
When we built our Android and iOS SDKs, we ensured that our customers would not only enjoy ground truth accuracy, real-timeness of data sent to the cloud, and efficient battery state management, but also benefit from the resilience of the platform. Our customers depend on HyperTrack for this stability when it comes to managing system-wide, user induced, and cloud infrastructure driven outages that sometimes occur outside the customer’s control.
Cloud infrastructure outages between app users on the ground and HyperTrack’s platform are an inevitable part of today’s reality. Given that a device is mobile, and not solidly connected to anything, outages are not an exception, but a rule. We've designed our system with this fact in mind. Since mobile outages are the norm, we’ve built our SDKs for both mobile OSs with functional resilience.
This incident is an example of why logistic tech builders can count on HyperTrack to receive ground truth data from their app users, even in the unfortunate scenario of a multiple hour outage. This is just one way HyperTrack helps teams become more nimble and strategic with their use of logistics technology.
Interested in learning more about building stable yet flexible logistic tech? We are happy to talk to you! Reach out to our solution architecture team today for more information.
