Wave of Change: AWS-Powered Innovation Secures Micronesia’s Seas with Coral Consulting!

Introduction

atWare Vietnam has partnered with Micronesia Reef Monitoring, an organization to create a new service using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for improved efficiency and cost-savings. The goal is to develop a web application that provides a regional registry for Marine Protected Areas (MPA). The project is part of a greater conservation effort that includes research and policy support in Micronesia to prevent illegal fishing and provide MPA information for donors. Increased funding for the service's continued development has resulted from its successful launch.

Opportunity | Possibility of a marine environment protection project

The Micronesia Reef Monitoring was established to provide a standardized, safe, and accessible platform to hold our growing regional datasets. This project was initially developed in support of the Micronesia Challenge.

The Micronesian Challenge (MC) represents a locally-driven conservation movement that was originated and perpetuated by the political leaders of Micronesia. The challenge is for jurisdictions to meet effective conservation thresholds across 50% of their marine resources and 30% of their terrestrial resources by 2030. Through the MC, several smaller working groups were created to facilitate progress and create relevant, regional networks. This process has led to the creation of the MC marine measures group which has been highly influential in successful, standardized coral-reef monitoring activities across Micronesia.

To leverage the collected datasets of the Micronesia Reef Monitoring system, they need to visualize them into the web application and seek a strong team to help them develop it.

At that time, Micronesia Reef Monitoring approached atWareVN with this opportunity because of atWareVN's depth of experience and talent.

Proposed Solution

Because the project is non-profit, and the development budget is limited, we have to choose an architecture to optimize costs, so serverless is a good choice. The AWS serverless architecture and the ease of use of the AWS services inside it free up our team's time to produce business value.

The proposed solution involves implementing a 3-tier web application using AWS services. The front end is hosted on Amazon S3 and leverages Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. We registered the domain by Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.

The back-end services will be serverless, utilizing AWS Lambda and integrating with AWS API Gateway, acting as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. The database will be hosted on DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at any scale, reducing the management overhead. The total cost for infrastructure is around 31$ monthly and increases when more users access

Technical stack proposal

Frontend: Nrwl/nx, React, Mapbox for MPA Visualization
Backend: Golang, Python
Unit testing: Jest
E2E Testing: Playwright
Authentication: Google Firebase and Firestore

Initially, we used Google as our MPA polygon rendering engine. However, we encountered performance problems when presenting thousands of data points in a Google Map. After some time spent researching, we decided to utilize MapBox instead because it features a map engine that allows us to render the data using GeoJSON (see the image below).

Increasing Sponsorship

By demonstrating the capabilities of the service, Coral Consulting has successfully attracted more investment and sponsorship. The service’s usefulness in protecting the environment and addressing the need for marine conservation has resonated with sponsors, highlighting the importance of the project.

This project has significant implications for the protection of Micronesia’s marine and island areas. Through the implementation of this service, Coral Consulting and our team are contributing to the preservation of the environment and the sustainable management of marine resources