Road Safety and Transport Authority

The Challenge

eRaLIS — the electronic Registration and Licensing Information System — is the system every Bhutanese driver, vehicle owner, and transport operator interacts with sooner or later. By the early 2020s its first generation was struggling under the weight: a Java 6 monolithic application with a single-server routing model, where a problem in one corner of the codebase could take the whole platform offline. Adding a new service was slow, fault-isolation was effectively non-existent, and most citizen interactions still meant a trip to an RSTA branch.

RSTA needed a rewrite that fixed all three problems at once: decouple the services so an outage in one wouldn't cascade, move as much of the catalogue online as possible so citizens didn't have to travel, and integrate cleanly with the national payment and identity infrastructure that had matured since v1 shipped.

The Approach

We rebuilt eRaLIS from the ground up as eRaLIS v2.0 on a microservices architecture. Each service — driving licence renewal, driving test booking, learner licence issuance, vehicle ownership transfer, and the rest — runs independently. If one service has a bad day, the others stay up. Adding the next service is a deploy, not a release-train.

The catalogue grew to fifteen services in total, ten of them available online as full self-service flows. Citizens sign in with Bhutan NDI, the national digital identity, so there's no separate eRaLIS account to manage. Payments route through the RMA Payment Gateway with bank-to-bank options and mobile banking via QR, so the entire flow — request, pay, receive — can happen from a phone.

The officer-facing tools were redesigned alongside, so the same services that citizens use online are also the ones counter staff work with at the branch.

The Outcome

eRaLIS v2.0 went live on 8 August 2022. Renewing a driving licence, booking a test, transferring a vehicle — services that had historically required an in-person visit — became things a citizen could complete in minutes from anywhere with a phone signal.

The architectural shift to microservices matters as much as the feature list: a service-level incident in v1 took the platform down; in v2.0 it stays contained. That fault isolation gives RSTA the room to keep extending the online catalogue without risking the services that already work.

Since launch we've remained RSTA's engineering partner under an Annual Maintenance Contract, handling every enhancement to the platform — new services added to the catalogue, performance work, integration changes as the national payment and identity rails evolve, and the day-to-day operational work that keeps a system this central running. eRaLIS isn't a project we delivered and walked away from; it's one we maintain and evolve end-to-end on RSTA's behalf.