ParkMobile’s cloud transformation paves way to new business

The pandemic’s pause on commuting put a temporary end to a second ire for many workers: parking.

But parking service provider ParkMobile didn’t idle as commuters worked from home through those early months of COVID-19, instead making use of the downtime its business experienced to accelerate its digital transformation to a cloud-native infrastructure in the most cost-effective way possible.

The Atlanta-based company, which started its digital transformation in 2018, began moving its assets from an on-premises managed service provider to Amazon Web Services in mid-2020 as offices remained shut down across the US — and parking spaces remained empty. 

What made ParkMobile’s approach unique, according to Chris Salomon, its vice president of software and cloud engineering, was the collection of technologies chosen out of the gate to gain quick efficiencies, including Amazon Elastic Cache, Amazon Aurora for MySQL and Postgres, Amazon Relational Database Service, and Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka.

ParkMobile’s cloud transformation today is roughly 90% complete, with an infrastructure that is 80% cloud native and 20% on premises or managed service, Salomon says.

“We’re less operation-centric” now because of the transformation, he says. “Instead of having folks here just looking at your databases 24/7, we’re actually leveraging the resources that we get out of AWS as managed services.”