Geospatial Tracking Platform

Summary

A real-time location tracking platform for moving entities: vehicles, delivery couriers, field workers, and assets: receiving position updates at 1–30 second intervals from thousands of simultaneously tracked objects. Redis geospatial indexes (GEOADD / GEOSEARCH) serve sub-10ms proximity queries against the live position surface; PostgreSQL stores durable entity metadata and historical location records; TimescaleDB stores high-frequency time-series location data with automatic hypertable chunking and retention policies; Kafka streams location events to downstream consumers (dispatch systems, customer tracking apps, analytics pipelines). Geofence evaluation runs at ingestion time: each incoming position update is tested against active geofences for the entity's region, and geofence entry/exit events are emitted as Kafka messages to downstream consumers.

Problem Statement

Tracking systems generate a continuous, high-volume write stream where the business value is in the current position (proximity queries, dispatch routing, ETA calculation) and the historical record (route replay, SLA verification, compliance). These two consumers have fundamentally different requirements: the current-position consumer needs sub-10ms query latency against the latest known position of every entity in a geographic radius; the historical consumer needs efficient time-range queries over months of location data per entity. A 10,000-entity fleet updating at 1Hz generates 864 million location records per day: storing all records in PostgreSQL is not sustainable past 30 days without aggressive partitioning and archival. Geofence evaluation at 10,000 updates/second requires that the fence evaluation code path not be in the synchronous API response path.