City of Tampere

The use of a cloud environment increases operational reliability and eases service implementation

Citizens’ expectations for digital services are constantly growing which puts pressure on municipalities and cities. Gofore implemented a service for the City of Tampere based on Espoo’s eVaka system, which brings early childhood education transactions to one place. The system, based on open source code, eliminates duplicate development work and lives up to the changing needs of the city and its citizens.

AWS offers reliable and easy-to-deploy infrastructure to support the solution of municipality-specific needs

Citizens’ expectations for digital services are constantly growing which puts pressure on municipalities and cities. Gofore implemented a service for the City of Tampere based on Espoo’s eVaka system, which brings early childhood education transactions to one place. The system, based on open source code, eliminates duplicate development work and lives up to the changing needs of the city and its citizens.

Despite the fact that the development utilizes existing technology, the eVaka system cannot be used in different cities as is. Gofore’s task was to adapt the core of Espoo’s solution to Tampere’s operating environment. Prior to the development work, the weaknesses and strengths of the existing systems and the needs of the users were clarified, among other things.

“The most important thing is to develop the customer experience from the point of view of both administration users and parents. Gofore has been a great help in this,” says Arto Kahila, Information Management Director of the City of Tampere.

In Tampere, eVaka replaces the previously used Effica and Päikky services. Evaka’s solution is scalable and based on open source, which enables cost-effective municipality-specific customizations. The solution is being built in cooperation with three other cities. All cities use the same application, but their own AWS cloud environment.

The most important thing is to develop the customer experience from the point of view of both administration users and parents. Gofore has been a great help in this.

Arto Kahila, Information Management Director, City of Tampere

EVaka enables:

Applying for an early childhood education place and, in the future, a pre-school place
Notification of childcare schedules
Recording of the employee work hours
Communication between the daycare and parents
Real-time financial monitoring for early childhood education managers with the use and occupancy rates of early childhood education units
Activity reporting
Processing of invoicing and service vouchers
Integration with the National Agency of Education’s Varda and, in the future, Koski interfaces

Solution architecture

In the backend systems of the eVaka application, the most important parts are the database and the architecture consisting of microservices. AWS Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) was a clear choice for a relational database because there was no reason or desire for the customer to maintain the database. AWS Elastic Container Service has been a natural and self-scaling option for implementing a microservice architecture.

The choice of technology platform is decided by the customer, but of course, the experts are listened to during the clarification phase. When making platform choices for the TreVaka application, the ready and direct dependencies on AWS in eVaka were sending email and using AWS S3. The implementation of the ready-made architectural solution has been simpler and has strengthened the cooperation between cities in the introduction of the service, development, and maintenance by the municipality.

The automation of setting up cloud infrastructure for different environments, such as test, staging, and production environments, was built with Terraform.
AWS RDS (Relational Database Service), AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service), AWS ALB (Application Load Balancer), and Route53 enable a scalable and reliable web service solution.
Elastic has a cache for authentication tokens and a cache for the population information system interface.
S3 Bucket is used to store files and provide them to the customer.
AWS SNS (Simple Notification Service) is used to monitor logs, which enables real-time notifications to e-mail.
Logs are collected in Cloudwatch.
CircleCI was chosen as the Continuous Improvement solution, which enables application artifacts to be built automatically and installed in different runtime environments.
Datadog is used to monitor AWS performance, from which alerts are sent to the developers’ Slack.

The development in Tampere has been done for about two years. The introduction of the system started with the construction of the test environment. Municipality-specific changes and improvements have been made according to an agile and iterative development model since then. In production, the system was put into use at the beginning of April 2022 in Tampere. AWS has provided reliable, easy-to-deploy, and municipally repeatable infrastructure to support the actual solving of application and municipality-specific problems.