Cloud infrastructure and DevOps support for Medonet during the COVID-19 pandemic
The cloud infrastructure and DevOps support provided by Hostersi allowed Medonet to quickly launch an Internet service verifying the risk of coronavirus infection and the publication of the latest data on the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and the world.
The project had several business challenges:
- It was necessary to provision the entire infrastructure in a short time because a lot of people wanted to check if they were at risk and keep track of information related to the spread of the pandemic.
- A reliable IT infrastructure with high SLA was necessary to withstand a sudden, rapid increase in website traffic.
Solution:
In response to the requirements of Medonet, we proposed using Amazon Web Services, because it offered the best match to business and technical requirements as well as budget control. Ringier Axel Springer has already been using AWS in other areas. This allowed us to easily integrate the infrastructure we created with the Ring Publishing platform used by the publisher.
Short deadlines required to implement the infrastructure in two stages:
- The first stage - launching a safe and compliant infrastructure in a very short time. DevOps worked in two shifts, from 9.00 to 17.00, and from 16.00 to 24.00 to complete the work before midnight. Also, a 5 hour long series of tests were carried out.
- The second stage - making modifications to the infrastructure, moving from relational RDS database to NoSQL database and adapting the application to the NoSQL database. This change has significantly reduced costs while increasing the flexibility and performance of the IT infrastructure.
Hostersi also provide 24/7 administration and server management service for this project with contractual warranties regarding response times for critical issues.
Technologies:
- EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - a service that provides variable computing capacity in the cloud) – backend in an auto-scaling group
- S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) – frontend
- Terraform (infrastructure as code)
- CloudWatch (monitoring tool) - for collecting infrastructure logs
- NoSQL (created for specific data models with flexible schemes for creating modern applications) – database server
- Ring Accelerator – a component of the Ring Publishing digital publishing platform that provides an efficient content delivery layer optimized for scalability and efficiency.
Customer benefits:
Thanks to the rapid implementation (the infrastructure was ready within 24 hours), the service was the first one of its kind available in Poland, providing an excellent source of knowledge on potential infection and the pandemic. In total, over half a million questionnaires that were aimed at verifying the possibility of infection were completed by users. Apart from a stable and efficient infrastructure, the Customer has also benefit.
Read also:
44-200 Rybnik
Poland
REGON: 240692928
National Court Register (KRS): 275333
