GovCMS — managing increased website demand during COVID-19

Helping government respond to a pandemic and serve citizens

Case study summary: Salsa, amazee.io and GovCMS worked together managing huge traffic spikes on the GovCMS platform. We further enhanced the platform’s scalability with additional in-memory caching, and refinements to the web infrastructure.

On this page:

At a glance

<$50K
2020
4 to 6 months
Completed
GovCMS, Drupal, LAGOON
Federal government
Hosting & maintenance, Support & optimisation
Multidisciplinary teams, Tools & systems, Open standards & common platforms, Measure performance

Overview

GovCMS’ challenge

During the pandemic, government websites experienced unprecedented traffic. With massive increases in traffic (one site was up 4,600%) GovCMS needed to ensure the platform could respond.

GovCMS’ transformation

Salsa, amazee.io and GovCMS set up scaling and caching strategies to meet the significant increases in traffic.

The outcomes

  • Platform that can handle rapid ramp ups of traffic
  • Tailored caching solution
  • Process improvements and the introduction of burst capacity for high traffic events

Full case study

GovCMS’ challenge — responding to unprecedented traffic spikes

When the pandemic hit, many government websites around the world experienced significant spikes in traffic. Citizens were turning to online resources for more information and often government officials were referring people to websites during their media briefings. Government websites hosted on GovCMS were no exception. With unprecedented traffic, GovCMS needed to ensure the platform could respond.

The below stats for April and May 2020 provide an insight into the numbers:

  • Traffic was up to 168TB, hitting 8.4TB in one day
  • Hits were also up, with the highest single day at 103 million
  • One GovCMS site had 147,000 peak concurrent users

One of the main sites experiencing greater demand was health.gov.au. This site had a 4,600% increase in site visitors, with 5.3 million hits per day and up to 100,000 hits per minute. Find out more in the GovCMS case studyExternal Link

GovCMS’ transformation — refined platform architecture

The GovCMS platform is designed to be scalable, however the numbers during March, April and May of 2020 was significantly higher than ever anticipated. Salsa, amazee.io and GovCMS worked closely together to enhance the Lagoon platform and AWS infrastructure.

Some of the key enhancements were:

  • Additional in-memory caching

  • New parameters to scale web infrastructure quickly and handle the large spikes in traffic, including the definition of pre-scaling targets such as the COVID horizontal pod autoscaler (HPA), which allows us to scale up the project workloads in preparation for scale

  • Backend cache optimisations for high profile sites by implementing a scalable Redis solution with ElastiCache

  • Optimised the platform’s ability to scale by tuning Kubernetes objects

  • Pre-scaled high profile projects to give increased headroom for a high traffic event

  • Optimised server configuration to better support cacheability (e.g. tuned PHP memory limits and opcache configuration)

  • Set alarms for infrastructure metrics

The platform was able to maintain a 99.95% SLA despite the extreme traffic surges.

The outcomes —an even more resilient platform

  • Platform that can handle rapid ramp ups of traffic

  • Tailored caching solution with the ability to apply configurations based on different site profiles

  • Process improvements and the introduction of burst capacity to monitor and be on stand-by during high traffic events

About GovCMS

The Department of FinanceExternal Link (Finance) owns the GovCMS platform, a whole-of-government digital platform for use across all levels of government in Australia. GovCMS is built on Drupal, an award-winning, enterprise-grade CMS that’s easy to use, stable, highly secure and open source (no license fees).