BluePi helped abp scale up for high demand

Challenge

ABP Live is one of the largest online news publishing platforms, with more than 6 languages including 5 different Indian vernacular languages. The combined readership is more than 500 million page views per month. During special occasions the readership jumps many fold, as a lot of

people flock to ABP network sites due to its credibility and propen- sity to break the news first. For example on a typical boards result

day the expected readerships spikes way beyond the regular traffic. This time around ABP team was expecting a huge spike of around 1 million requests per minute. The spike was expected based on the previous year trends and also due to the new interactive features that were going live. For a high volume, short duration burst like this the idea was to implement a mechanism that would not only work this time around, but also would scale automatically whenever there is such a need in the future as well.

Solution

The solution that suits this type of requirement very well, is to modernize the application stack onto a serverless architecture. With AWS great services like DynamoDB and API gateways, the team achieved a serverless implementation in record time. Well a picture is worth a thousand words, this is how we achieved it:

Business value delivered

Since going live with the serverless architecture a couple of result campaigns have already run successfully. The peak load for these result campaigns was around 2.08 million concurrent requests. Not only did the infrastructure scale successfully to maintain a 100% up time, but the cherry on the top is that the total spend was around 15$ for each of the campaigns. Earlier for the same campaigns ABP team was spending around 530$ per campaign.

Some of the highlights

• Cost benefits as we saved approx $530 per campaign.
• Short lived high spikes executed without any incident.
• Unparallel scalability and fault tolerance.
• Savings in term of maintenance and support as there is no need to provision or maintain any servers, neither any software or runtime to install/maintain
• Increased agility in development and testing out new ideas while significantly lowering total cost of ownership (TCO)

Technology deployed

AWS services were critical in getting the serverless architecture in place in such a short time. The AWS services we used in this particular case are:

• AWS API Gateway
• AWS Lambda
• AWS Dynamodb
• AWS CloudWatch
• AWS SNS