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HydroRoute

"A lightweight, data-integrated rain navigation network deployed on an AWS EC2 instance featuring a 15-minute transactional decay filter to remove crowdsourced data spam."

Deployed on AWS: How I Built HydroRoute to Solve Monsoon Waterlogging Spam ⛈️💻
During intense monsoons, navigating the streets of Delhi-NCR turns into a dangerous guessing game. Standard GPS tools track vehicle speeds perfectly, but they fail to warn commuters about the primary dangers: knee-deep waterlogging, flash floods, and hidden, submerged potholes. As a first-semester computer science student specializing in the Industrial Internet of Things (CSE IIoT), I set out to build HydroRoute—a crowdsourced, real-time rain navigation matrix designed to give drivers precise, live road-condition alerts. But crowdsourced data has a massive vulnerability: stale listings, malicious data, and spam pins. To solve this, I engineered a 15-minute transactional data-decay loop and deployed the entire system live on Amazon Web Services (AWS)!
🛠️ The Architecture & Open-Source Stack
To build a highly responsive platform quickly without deep frontend web experience, I leaned heavily on the Python open-source data ecosystem: • Streamlit Open-Source Framework: Allowed me to build and render a full visual user dashboard entirely within a single Python script—completely bypassing complex HTML/JavaScript layers. • OpenStreetMap Integration: Used to dynamically plot geographic threat coordinates over localized areas without hitting heavy corporate API walls. • Pandas & NumPy: Ingests each crowdsourced report as a precise transactional datetime object to run the automated time-checking loops.
☁️ The AWS Infrastructure Setup
The application is fully operational and hosted live on a public endpoint using core cloud building blocks:
  1. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): The entire application backend engine runs 24/7 on an optimized Amazon Linux 2023 EC2 micro instance based in the ap-south-1 (Mumbai) region node.
  1. AWS Security Groups (Virtual Firewall): Configured with tailored inbound traffic constraints to safely broadcast web requests across Custom TCP Port 8501, while keeping Port 22 rules secure for remote command-line administration.
⏱️ How the 15-Minute Expiration Core Works
When a driver logs an active road obstruction, HydroRoute pins the coordinates to the interactive map dashboard. However, if subsequent commuters passing through the same segment do not continuously re-verify the threat within 15 minutes, the application’s logic engine automatically shifts the item's status to Expired and purges it from the live threat grid. This guarantees absolute data integrity.
🚀 The Enterprise Roadmap: Going Serverless
While hosting the prototype on a standalone EC2 instance works perfectly for this stage, I designed the logical schema to scale effortlessly into a robust, high-availability AWS serverless ecosystem: • Ingress Layer: Amazon API Gateway will catch incoming commuter alert payloads. • Compute Layer: AWS Lambda functions will execute rapid spatial and data validation checks on demand. • Database Layer: Amazon DynamoDB will store active threats, utilizing its native Time-to-Live (TTL) attribute to automate the 15-minute record deletion directly inside the database layer—completely removing computational load from the server. Building this project solo in my first semester has completely transformed how I think about cloud infrastructure. Building in public on AWS shows that with the right building blocks, you can take an idea from a blank file to a live public portal in less than 48 hours! 👉 Check out my live application here:  http://15.252.243.168:8501  👉 Review the complete source code on GitHub:  https://github.com/akshatsha2409-creator/HydroRoute 
Any opinions in this article are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.
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