React Mobile is a leading provider of panic button solutions for some of the world’s largest hospitality enterprises, including Caesars, Waldorf Astoria, Pan Pacific, and Sands. Its flagship hospitality safety platform consists of hardware and apps backed by a robust cloud-based SaaS platform which together provide an enhanced safety solution for protecting enterprise hotel clients’ employees.
The company’s flagship Workplace Safety Platform combines enterprise employee safety alert devices (i.e., panic buttons) with a system that enables management to rapidly deploy response resources to the exact location of an emergency. With more than 50,000 panic buttons deployed worldwide, React Mobile’s solution is helping to create safer, more accommodating work environments for employees in hospitality, education, and healthcare markets across the globe.
The Workplace Safety Platform is a mission-critical solution for expediting emergency responses and bolstering safety, with stringent requirements for high availability and security. To meet customer expectations, React Mobile required high availability from day one, moving towards very high (99.99%+) availability in the future. Strong security was also necessary to avoid both application issues and data leaks.
The cloud components of the Workplace Safety Platform needed to integrate with IoT hardware, adding to the architectural complexity.
React Mobile’s previous installation of the Workplace Safety Platform was on a platform-as-a-service provider that was unable to deliver sufficient uptime guarantees or provide sufficient control to ensure strong security. CTO Riley Eller says, “BitPusher ensures that our servers are always up, with the highest level of reliability, and insulates our developers from the day to day operation so that we can provide 24/7 support with minimal overhead cost. It’s a great partnership that we rely on every day.”
To meet the stringent requirements of its growing client base, React Mobile brought in BitPusher to help it move from its legacy platform-as-a-service provider to AWS. Meanwhile, they would redevelop their app for higher availability at both the code and infrastructure levels, with guidance from BitPusher.
BitPusher played a key role in helping React Mobile translate its business requirements into a high availability architecture, covering both the infrastructure and key aspects of how the panic button devices interact with that infrastructure.
For the administrative interface which customers use to modify the user, device, and alert configuration, BitPusher designed and implemented a high availability infrastructure by leveraging multiple AWS availability zones (AZs). This was built with Application Load Balancers, EC2 instances in three separate AZs, and multi-AZ RDS (PostgreSQL) for the database.
For the delivery of panic button alerts, the availability requirements were even more stringent. BitPusher designed a bespoke architecture which provides very high availability, low latency, and low cost by sending redundant events through infrastructure in separate AWS regions, with a best-effort deduplication before the final alert is issued. This component only needs read-only access to shared data, allowing for it to be multi-region without requiring an expensive (and technically complex) geographically distributed writable data store.
During the buildout and migration process, BitPusher coordinated with React Mobile’s development team on the CI/CD pipeline, and implemented separate development, staging, and production environments, in separate AWS accounts to support their software development lifecycle. Consistency between the separate environments is ensured by a fully-realized infrastructure-as-code workflow (specifically Terraform for AWS resources, and Chef for management of the file systems contents on EC2 instances).
Once development was complete on the AWS side, BitPusher worked with React Mobile to ensure a smooth transition for users and legacy data as they were migrated to the new environment. Customized monitoring for both visibility and actionable alarms were set up to provide comprehensive situational awareness across their platform — for both workload/traffic monitoring during the migration and post-deployment operational monitoring.
To prevent both security breaches and security-related downtime, special attention was given to designing infrastructure that was highly secure as well as highly available. Least-privilege security group rules were implemented both to protect the perimeter and to limit the impact radius of breaches. GuardDuty intrusion detection was implemented across React Mobile’s AWS Organization, with EventBridge-powered alarms for high severity findings. These and other tools provide both 24/7 security awareness for critical issues and broad visibility for lower urgency issues.
With BitPusher’s strategic guidance, React Mobile was able to migrate its Workplace Safety Platform to AWS and meet its business requirements for mitigating downtime risk through a multi-region strategy for high availability alerts. On the user experience side, React Mobile’s customers have continuous access to an uninterrupted, reliable panic button service that always works. The architecture was designed to grow, allowing it to scale up at least an order of magnitude without significant changes or downtime, simply by adding compute resources and resizing the database. Due to Bitpusher’s strong security controls and continued infrastructure management, React Mobile knows that malicious activity will be detected and mitigated, maintaining the integrity and availability of their Platform. “BitPusher is proud to partner with organizations like React Mobile that put their clients first by emphasizing the importance of security and providing high availability architecture in their workplace safety solutions,” said Daniel Lieberman, BitPusher CEO and Founder.
About BitPusher
BitPusher is a DevOps company offering project work and ongoing management at a higher quality and lower, more predictable cost than consultants or in-house teams. Over the past 20 years Bitpusher has developed a delivery model based on reusable engineering components and a collaborative approach which allows for the right combination of availability, scalability, security, performance, and a cost-efficient use of hosting resources.
BitPusher is an advanced tier AWS consulting partner, an AWS public sector partner, and part of the AWS solution provider program.
