Serverless Automation with AWS Lambda for Upaya City Cargo

Company Background

Upaya City Cargo is Nepal’s leading digital logistics and supply chain platform, providing on-demand and intercity delivery services through technology-driven solutions. Operating across multiple cities with thousands of driver partners, Upaya connects businesses and customers for seamless cargo movement, aiming to become the backbone of Digital Nepal’s logistics infrastructure.

As Upaya’s operations expanded, managing large volumes of transactions, real-time tracking updates, and asynchronous system events became increasingly complex. The engineering team sought a scalable, automated, and cost-efficient backend that could process millions of daily events without manual intervention or infrastructure overhead.

Problem Faced by Upaya City Cargo

Upaya’s microservices and legacy EC2-based backend were heavily dependent on scheduled cron jobs and background queues for data synchronization and event processing.

The system encountered several challenges:

• High infrastructure cost for always-on EC2 instances running low-frequency workloads

• Delays in event processing during traffic surges, affecting real-time delivery updates

• Manual scaling and maintenance complexity during high order volumes

• Inefficient error handling and limited visibility into failed jobs

To maintain performance and cost efficiency, Upaya required an event-driven serverless architecture that could scale automatically and run only when needed.

Solution Provided by Cloudlaya

As a trusted AWS Advanced Partner, Cloudlaya helped Upaya re-architect critical backend components using AWS Lambda and other serverless services.

The solution introduced fully automated, event-driven workflows, eliminating the need for manual scaling or idle compute costs.

Key AWS Components:

• AWS Lambda – Core backend engine for processing logistics events, generating reports, and executing scheduled jobs.

• Amazon API Gateway – Securely exposes APIs for driver, customer, and admin applications, triggering Lambda functions on demand.

• Amazon S3 – Stores order documents, delivery reports, and event payloads, integrated with Lambda for automated post-upload processing.

• Amazon DynamoDB – Provides a scalable NoSQL database for tracking order states and job metadata.

• Amazon SNS & SQS – Handles asynchronous message queuing between microservices.

• Amazon CloudWatch & AWS X-Ray – Provides monitoring, logging, and performance tracing for each Lambda invocation.

• AWS CodePipeline + CodeBuild – Enables CI/CD automation for deploying Lambda functions safely and consistently.

Architecture Overview:
User requests → API Gateway → Lambda functions → DynamoDB / RDS
Background events → S3 → EventBridge → Lambda processing
Notifications → SNS → Slack / PagerDuty

Effects and Outcomes

Business Impact

The serverless migration empowered Upaya City Cargo to process real-time delivery updates, driver onboarding events, and invoice generation automatically, with zero manual intervention.
Lambda’s pay-per-use model significantly reduced operating costs, while the automation improved customer satisfaction through instant notifications and reliable API responses.

Conclusion

By leveraging AWS Lambda, Upaya City Cargo successfully transitioned from a manually managed EC2 architecture to a scalable, automated, and serverless logistics platform.
This transformation not only optimized operational efficiency and cost but also positioned Upaya to scale seamlessly with growing delivery demands.

Key Success Factors:

• Event-driven automation using AWS Lambda and API Gateway

• Integrated observability with CloudWatch and X-Ray

• CI/CD automation with CodePipeline for continuous deployment

• Pay-per-execution cost model improving ROI

Through this AWS Lambda implementation, Cloudlaya enabled Upaya to modernize its operations and deliver reliable, real-time logistics experiences—supporting its vision to build Digital Nepal’s logistics backbone.