Taking an electronic ticketing system to the cloud: Design and discussion

In this paper we address the challenge of creating an electronic ticketing system for transportation systems that can partially or completely run on the cloud. This challenge is defined within the scope of an industrial project. The resulting system should be able to reach a large spectrum of customers and should provide two key advantages: lower operational costs, especially for small clients without IT departments, and faster execution of queries for monthly or other sorts of analysis, using the elasticity of cloud-based resources. To fulfill the goals of the project, we propose very standard technologies and procedures: a three-tiered architecture; a separation of the online and analysis databases; and an Enterprise Service Bus to get the input from very diverse hardware and software stacks. In this paper we discuss several options regarding the location of these facilities on the cloud and we also evaluate the costs involved. While this work already defines many features of the system, it must be considered as preliminary, as some open details remain for future work.