Skyscrapers helps iVox launch National campaigns on AWS

iVox had developed a new survey-platform for a national campaign. They were uncertain if their application would be able to handle what was coming

Written by fdenkens Posted on September 25th 2015

iVox had developed a new survey-platform for a national campaign. They were uncertain if their application would be able to handle what was coming:

  • Prime-time national exposure
  • Expectation of up to 1.500.000 million visitors, up to 25K concurrent visitors
  • High-exposure campaign, with major media-brands as stakeholder

Once our experts reviewed the application and architecture, we quickly noticed major bottlenecks. These could potentially cost the customer a lot of money:

  • a LOT of hosting infrastructure needed to scale the monolithic, session-full application
  • brand-damage due to the high risk of downtime or bad performance

In strong collaboration with their development team we were able to mitigate all these bottlenecks. Which resulted in a success for our customer who was able to handle the peak load:

  • Required hosting cost went from $ 10.000 to $ 2.500 for a similar campaign
  • Went from high-latency (0,5s – 2s) to 700ms – 1s latencies, even under high stress
  • From a worried customer to a very happy customer

How did we realise this amazing result? By sharing our insights into cloud-native design practices and cloud, we took big steps:

  • Review storage strategies of ALL data in the application
  • Made the application stateless
  • Reduced server touch-points during the application by 90%
  • Event based auto-scaling

Our Managed Cloud Services made sure that the 24/7 operations were smooth as silk during the campaign .

Future steps we’re looking at:

  • Introducing Continuous Integration (CI) in combination with automated deployments for being able to quickly launch new campaigns.
  • Further optimising the application by decoupling certain functionalities
  • Etc
    Want to discover how we can help you launch new, large-scale campaigns without worries? Get in touch!