The Challenge
What Spander Was Facing
Spander delivers turn-by-turn navigation and location intelligence to fleet operators. The platform had to serve route computations and live map tiles to thousands of concurrent vehicle clients, handle intermittent connectivity gracefully, and update routing graphs in near-real-time as road conditions changed — all while maintaining sub-second response times that drivers depend on.
The Solution
What We Built
We designed a geographically distributed architecture with route computation servers co-located in three AWS regions. Map tile delivery was served from CloudFront with aggressive caching — tiles rarely change, so cache hit rates above 99% were achievable with correct cache key design. The routing graph update pipeline ingested road condition data via a Kafka stream and applied incremental graph patches without requiring full graph reloads. Client SDKs buffered recent route segments locally for graceful offline degradation. Infrastructure was fully managed via Terraform, with automated failover between regions triggered by Route 53 health checks.
Results