HERE partnership puts millions of Amazon Web Services developers on the map

Making it faster and easier to build location intelligence into applications has long been a big priority at HERE. Now a new strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services has opened up that capability to a community of around two million AWS developers around the world.

Yes, you read that correctly – two million developers.

It’s a hugely important alliance for HERE, and one that we hope will make us the de facto location intelligence and services provider to the enormous and ever-growing world of developers who use the AWS infrastructure around the world.

The ability to access the location services is crucial of course, but it’s the way we’re enabling access that gives this partnership so much potential. We are making it very easy for developers to consume our APIs and services from within the AWS and broader Amazon environment, enabling those APIs to be grabbed and applied from the cloud wherever development teams may be. A serverless approach removes the barriers to deliver seamless, simple application of the services.

Micro services approach for improved development

Here’s how it works. Developers can rapidly deploy AWS Lambdas into their own AWS account so that they serve as proxies to HERE location services. This provides a micro services approach to how those location capabilities are applied, so that app development projects benefit from AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda capabilities such as cache, throttling and authentication. It puts some powerful new AWS tools at developers’ fingertips.

For example, to use HERE APIs you must provide credential values from the calling client code. If you have an application that supports web and mobile clients, this would mean you need to configure each client to use your secret credential values. By using a serverless application, these values can be securely managed in the Cloud, and each client simply calls the serverless app via a custom API gateway.

Underpinning it all is something called the AWS Serverless Application Repository, which is a collection of apps published by serverless developers, companies and partners. You can find everything from code samples and components for building web and mobile applications to back-end processing services and complete applications.

Our strategic partnership with AWS - already our cloud partner - is a big step forward in HERE’s journey to enable the autonomous world. AWS has become one of the world’s biggest app development environments, meaning the ability to harness location intelligence with ease can speed development cycles and bring higher-quality location-driven capabilities to new apps.

Faster application of intelligence for autonomy

HERE services that we envisage developers making the most use of are those that enable applications to deliver a world with greater autonomy. Therefore, the HERE services we’ve made available as Serverless Applications include map images and tiles, geocoding, positioning, routing, road toll costs, road traffic conditions, public transit information and weather conditions.  To get started, we’ve provided this developer guide to discovering, selecting, and deploying the HERE Geocode Serverless Application for use in your development projects.

Working so closely with AWS, HERE has scaled its services to strengthen developer onboarding everywhere in the world, with geographical proximity to meet local data storage regulations and the benefit of low-latency development performance.