The Maker Space is a South African non-profit organisation that trains and connects creative unemployed youth with experienced product developers, engineers and designers to develop new solutions that aid in addressing South Africa social-economic challenges. The Maker Space’s expertise includes product development, additive manufacturing, digital manufacturing, automation, software and hardware development.

Why AWS?

Working with a network of innovators including Taylor Gibb from Developer Hut, The Maker Space responded to a need identified by Local Business Chambers and MEC of EDTEA in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Due to the urgent nature of the crisis, the team was able to prototype a matchmaking application over a weekend. Together with the Vodacom Business team, they were able to rapidly deploy the solution on AWS allowing near-infinite scalability. And so Covid Connect was born. AWS was the perfect home for Covid Connect, as standard website architecture would not cut the requirement, as we knew the platform needed to grow and scale from day 1.

Solution

Vodacom Business was able to support the initiative by highlighting services which would give Covid Connect a scalable and cost-effective solution. The Maker Space and Developer Hut leveraged a vast number of AWS features and services, across compute, databases and storage, including Amazon EC2, Amazon DocumentDB, and AWS Fargate to build the Covid Connect application. 

Application development ease

The Maker Space was able to spin up and deploy a website on AWS in three days, automatically and instantly matchmaking critical needs with available supplies and offers for help. Doctors, hospitals, non-profits with a shortage of food, water, or medical supplies can be quickly connected with people and organizations that have a surplus or willingness to help.

This has enabled the platform to be available and replicable to other global markets. It has also helped guide us with how The Maker Space can better deploy applications for businesses, as something that previously took weeks, has been reduced to days.
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Vodacom Business

Vodacom is excited about the AWS South Africa region launch. Through our Vodacom AWS skills, we can help build and manage your solutions so you can stay focused on your core business. Reach the next step of your digital transformation journey with Amazon Web Services (AWS) through Vodacom. A secure cloud service platform offering services which will help your business scale and grow.