GovCMS — managing increased website demand during COVID-19

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 — refined platform architecture

The GovCMS platform is designed to be scalable, however the numbers during March, April and May of 2020 were significantly higher than ever anticipated. Salsa Digital, 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