Emergency Panic Button System Migration and Cloud Cost Optimization for ROAR

Here’s how ROAR’s panic buttons work: when an employee is in danger, they press the button, which sends a signal to the floor gateway.

The gateway then alerts the mobile app, notifying nearby staff and showing exactly where help is needed.

But the emergency alarm button system was running on an old version of NervesHub, an open-source firmware update server, which was unstable and caused connections to drop.

We mapped the entire architecture, analyzed workflows, and uncovered the weak spots.

Reliable device connectivity was the top priority. To eliminate bugs and connection issues, ROAR needed to migrate all gateways from the outdated NervesHub 1.3 to NervesHub 2.2, the latest version of the device firmware update service.

Each of the 2500 floor gateways had to be connected without disrupting emergency reliability.

Yalantis helped ROAR design and implement a migration plan.

Here’s what we did:

• Rolled updates in waves to minimize risk
• Tested devices in multiple emergency scenarios
• Validated update success automatically to catch failures immediately

After the migration of the emergency push button system, connectivity became three times more reliable than on the old version of NervesHub.

Once connectivity was stabilized, the next pain point was the cloud bill.

ROAR’s emergency button system processed data from 80,000 devices, including status updates, alerts, and logs, and there was no cloud cost optimization in place, which caused the AWS costs to scale rapidly with more devices.

For cloud spend optimization, we offered to optimize the infrastructure of ROAR’s emergency button software.

In close collaboration, we implemented such steps:

• Re-architected the system on AWS for elastic scaling
• Optimized data storage with tiered approaches
• Reduced redundant logging and optimized communication protocols
• Built in auto-scaling rules so infrastructure only scaled when needed

The result was dramatic: a 60% reduction in cloud costs. Moreover, the platform became capable of supporting more devices without increasing costs.

Alongside technical improvements, we worked with ROAR’s team to refine their development approach.

Our CTO worked side by side with ROAR’s internal team to redesign development processes for more efficiency. We helped them set up dedicated environments for safer releases, introduced CI/CD pipelines for automation, and strengthened documentation and testing practices.

Finally, deployments became 8 times faster, and the team gained full confidence to work with the new infrastructure setup.

Our partnership with ROAR continues beyond system optimization. We now support their team with architecture reviews, cost management strategies, and guidance on best development practices.

Now, ROAR focuses on growth while Yalantis continues to be their strategic partner.