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Ensuring IT infrastructure efficiency at 99.9% with huge traffic fluctuations
What was the project about?
The Fryderyk Chopin Institute is the organizer of one of the largest and most famous piano competitions. Each edition of the Chopin Competition attracts the attention of millions of people around the world, gathering audiences both in front of TV sets and online. The cycle of eliminations, the final, and the winners’ concerts last from October 2 to 23. The traffic on the website and mobile application noticeably increase during this time.
Our client’s infrastructure and software were not adapted to handle such high and sudden increases in user activity. In previous years, this resulted in the temporary unavailability of services during the competition, which hurt the image of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute and prevented the promotion of the event on a larger scale.
5 months
Culture, entertainment
- Cloud services
- IT consulting
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Who did we help?
The Fryderyk Chopin Institute is the largest Chopin center in the world. The mission of the Institute is to protect, research, and disseminate the heritage of Fryderyk Chopin. The Institute is involved in many activities promoting the composer’s work, including organizing the international festival “Chopin and his Europe.”
What were the biggest challenges of the project?
The fact the permanent maintenance of infrastructure capable of handling the traffic of several million users was not economically justified was an essential element of the project. Usually, the Institute’s website generated a maximum of a few thousand visits a day. It was necessary to find a solution that would ensure the constant availability of services even in the event of sudden increases but did not cause additional costs daily.
- Considerable fluctuations in user activity. From several thousand requests on non-competition days to several dozen million during the finals.
- Lack of scalability of software solutions and infrastructure.
- No internal DevOps competencies.
- 99.9% availability expectation.
How did we address the challenge?
Considering the challenges we faced and the client’s expectations, we decided to use AWS cloud computing and its autoscaling capabilities in the project. As a result, during the highest activity at the end of the competition, the system processed over 48 million HTTPS requests within 3 hours. Throughout this period, there was any case of unavailability of services occurred.
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What did our cooperation look like?
Infrastructure performance analysis
We conducted an AWS stress-test, AWS Well-Architected Framework audit, and a cloud cost audit.
Recommendations for changes
We presented proposals for changes in the software and infrastructure configuration.
Implementation of changes and tests
After implementing the changes, we repeated all tests, achieving satisfactory results.
Support and monitoring
Our DevOps team provided active support and monitoring of the infrastructure condition during the competition.
What did we achieve?
Services were available continuously throughout the duration of the competition.
The system processed over 48 million HTTPS requests within 3 hours.
The final infrastructure cost has been significantly reduced.
What technologies have we used?
AWS stress-test
AWS Well-Architected Framework audit
Marketing Manager, The Fryderyk Chopin InstituteAltkoms technical and sales team were very professional and immediately gained our trust. After just a single meeting we knew it is the right choice. We have worked with other IT companies and I must admit, that working with Altkom was a particularly positive experience. We did not have any issues with services availability, our website and mobile app were fully responsive during the whole Piano Competition. The project was an absolute success
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