Solution components:

• Amazon S3
• AWS Elemental Package
• AWS Elemental Media Storage
• CloudFront

August 23, 2021

The project

The National Electoral Institute (INE) is the autonomous public body in charge of regulating the democratic processes of citizen participation in the United Mexican States, such as Elections of the Federal Executive and Legislative Power, as well as the electoral days in the 32 states of the Republic for the appointment of our representatives in public positions such as governments, councils, town halls, mayors, among others.

Challenges

The National Electoral Institute required hiring a hosting service in the cloud for multimedia video files in mp4 format, as well as a management platform that would allow, among other functions, the uploading, cataloging, publishing, and consultation of those videos.

An interface was also needed that could be integrated into the INE News Monitoring System for the reproduction of audiovisual materials, on demand, through said system and, pso, we find that the Institute required, at a minimum:

a) An administration platform with a web user interface that provides Administrator Access for the cataloging of multimedia files.

b) A player “type player” for displaying the files mp4.

c) A hosting service with HTTPS and TSL protocol security for uploading multimedia video files that also complies with ISO27001 and SOC 2 type regulatory frameworks.

d) A Web API that meets the necessary characteristics to adapt to the web application of the National Electoral Institute, simultaneously allowing integration with its Newscast Monitoring System.

e) A cloud hosting service robust enough to facilitate the viewing of multimedia files on a recurring basis by users, primarily through a player embedded in the INE web application.

The Solution

Our proposal was based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) best practices for uses of video storage in S3 and AWS services consumed through API Gateway.

Subsequently, the solution offered consisted, mainly, of a cloud storage system (Bucket S3) where, through the use of serverless services, ingestion, consultation and elimination activities of the multimedia files generated by the users of the National Electoral Institute were carried out during the periods of pre-campaigns, campaigns and political post-campaigns of the Electoral Process 2020-2021.

These services were integrated into the National Monitoring System (SMN) of the Institute, which consists of a Web Services (located in the INE’s own facilities) that performs user access and validation tasks, in addition to serving as the graphic environment for citizen interaction that accesses the portal.

In this sense, Itera proposed the construction of a Native API using Java Standard Edition (SE) in its version 7, which allowed integrating the Rest API solution with AWS in an inclusive manner to the web project that the National Electoral Institute already had.

The API resources were packaged in a JAR (Java Archive) extension file that included the source code (files with the “java” extension) and the corresponding binaries (files with the “class” extension).

For this, the “Facade” design pattern was used, which helped to establish a single communication interface between the 2021 pre-campaign system of the National Electoral Institute and the API Rest of AWS audio and video storage services. The “Factory” design pattern was also used to provide the implementation to that interface with a construction method that required a token o “security key” assigned for the Institute.

The access flow to the NMS query platform and the cloud storage service consisted primarily of handling an Access Key, which makes the access connection to the platform through a secure managed environment.

In this understanding, it is worth mentioning that the National Electoral Institute has a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) at the exposed frontier of the service, which is under its responsibility and where it manages its users assigned roles and credentials that, according to the level of privilege, allow the action of use on the different environments of the SMN.

What was obtained

What did we do differently in our offer?

• Cloud platform vs. on-premise platform and licensing.
• “Pay as you go” model.
• Demonstration of experience through Proof of Concept (PoC).

How was it to differentiate ourselves from the competition?

• We didn’t offer a platform and licenses; we offered services, security, scalability and efficiency within the budget of the Institute, as well as experience.
• We guarantee the ease of integrating the proposed APIs into the Institute’s application.

What were the internal AWS programs that helped us win?

• Cloud migration competition.
• Managed services competition.
• Demo of video services in S3.

The benefits

• More than 50,000 devices connected at the same time to the INE network.
• 100% secure elections and with ratified information integrity.
• Redundancy and availability greater than 99.95%
• 30% savings in data processing and storage.
• More than 80 thousand internal user connections per minute.
• More than 100 thousand visits per second to the page of the Institute en “time peak” of the day of the Federal Elections of Mexico 2021.
• Data transmission for more than 200 TB during the weekend of the 2021 democratic process.