Google Cloud Platform Blog: Building a humanitarian project monitoring tool on App Engine

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Building a humanitarian project monitoring tool on App Engine

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Today’s guest post is from Alex Bertram of Bedatadriven, who helps clients leverage data and analysis to achieve their goals with software development, consulting and training. In this post, Alex describes why they chose to use Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL.ActivityInfo

Affected populations plotted by size and type on a base map of Health Zones in Eastern DRC

Less time spent on reporting and collecting data, more on delivering practical aid and support to vulnerable people and communities

Builds a unified view of a humanitarian programme’s progress, across partners, regions and countries

Improves program quality, with faster and more accurate feedback into the project cycle

Choosing our Architectureopen sourced

Given the challenging environments that ActivityInfo users work in and the nature of the crises, we needed a platform that could ensure that the system was highly available.

Minimal system administration, allowing bedatadriven’s focus to remain on product development - delivering the tools and functions users need to manage successful relief operations.

A platform that could scale up and down according to the load, with minimal human intervention. The platform had to be scale automatically, as during a peak in a humanitarian crisis, when load can increase by an order of magnitude or more.

Clear monitoring tools to help pinpoint performance problems. Physics imposes a minimum latency of nearly 900 milliseconds per request for satellite connections, so it’s essential for us to keep the server response time as low as possible to ensure a responsive experience for users.