Case Study: GeoNet achieves fast, scalable, low-cost earthquake alerts for tens of thousands with Amazon Web Services

GeoNet - Customer Case Study

GeoNet, New Zealand’s geological hazard monitoring system run by GNS Science, needed a faster, cheaper way to warn people about earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. During the 2010 Christchurch quakes their on-premises, manual alert system required staff to send SMS, email and updates by hand, taking 9–20 minutes to issue notices and generating high messaging costs while only reaching a few hundred emergency-sector users. GNS wanted to scale notifications to reach the public, reduce delivery costs and improve responsiveness.

GeoNet rebuilt its notification stack on AWS—using EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, Elastic Beanstalk, SNS, SQS and CloudFormation—and launched Android and iOS apps with regional hosting in Sydney for lower latency. The move eliminated capital expenditure, automated scaling and cut delivery costs to about NZ$2,500 per month versus an estimated NZ$750,000 in SMS fees to reach the same audience. The system handled surges (150,000 active users and 101 million push notifications during a four-week quake period), delivered near‑100% reliability, and improved developer efficiency and security.

GeoNet

Geoff Clitheroe

GeoNet