Case Study
Infobae
Electoral Coverage 2019
Argentina, Uruguay y Bolivia
We built a Serverless Platform to provide a real-time National and Provincial Elections coverage. Through official data processing and a collection of infographic representations, Infobae readers were able to follow the voting recount of each election, by accessing the interactive map, the conformation of the Congress, and other elements.
The challenge
The biggest challenge of covering the elections is the high volume of users accessing simultaneously in a very short period of time. Since readers are aware that the National Electoral Directorate (DINE) will make the official data available at a certain time. At that precise moment, they access to the portal and maintain their interest for the next hours, surpassing the 6MM of concurrent unique users per minute. The key for success was have a highly scalable, fast and robust, and at the same time, cost efficient solution.
- The solution had to be able to scale elastically in a few seconds to respond to the high levels of demand generated by user traffic in the first minutes of each election coverage, that is, as soon as the first official data of each election is published. Rapidly scaling capacities to be able to respond all user requests, as soon as traffic increases and on the contrary, should decrease when traffic goes down to ensure, at all times, the best user experience and at the lowest possible cost.
- In addition, because of the large volume of data, it was vital to have a data-pipeline with sufficient capacity to standardize the data provided by the DINE and to make this information available at the national, provincial and even departmental levels (district or community headquarters) so that users can view the results of the different infographic representations in real time, based on their interests.
The Election Coverage is for the Media industry, like the Hot Sale is for the Retail industry.
The Approach
The architecture of this platform was designed based on Serverless Computing best practices and using the potential of Amazon Web Services we implemented a 100% Serverless solution, the key was the use of Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Function and Amazon Aurora Serverless, and other Serverless services to successfully fulfill the challenges raised. Because this type of architecture has the highest levels of availability and resilience, respond quickly to self-scaling based on traffic, are fully managed by AWS and also cost effective.
Partners
Key Results
- We are able to provide information to more than 6MM of concurrent users per minute, ensuring the service levels agreed at all times.
- We surpassed the historical traffic record. More than 20MM unique users (UUs) accessed the infographics during the electoral coverage.
- We maintained the average download speed below 4 seconds.
Conclusion
To achieve this goal, we work as part of the Organization. Together with the politics, product and technical areas of Infobae, we make a multidisciplinary team. We decided to use Serverless technologies over AWS that allowed us to ensure, at all times, the best user experience. Since readers could access various infographics with data that was updated in real time, beyond the sustained load that was growing minute by minute. It even allowed Infobae to be the first newspaper to publish the first results. Advantage of using innovative technologies that allowed us to successfully achieve business results.
- Serverless Technologies have the potential to transform the way businesses that the companys design, build, deploy, and improve their applications. It greatly reduces management and infrastructure costs while facilitating large-scale growing business evolution.
- Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service by AWS that made it easy for us to create, publish, maintain, monitor and secure private and public RESTful APIs with the highest levels of service according to the project needs.
- AWS Lambda is a disruptive technology where no servers need to be managed, you just need to focus on coding the business logic and running it. This made it easier for us to build business logic segmented into discrete functions based on a micro-services strategy. These functions perform very specific tasks, then are orchestrated using an event-based architecture by modeling the required business workflows.
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