During these days, schools are closed due to the emergency for COVID-19, and staff quickly reorganized to work from home. Teachers began to carry out distance learning, so the pupils and parents also used our application Nuvola more assiduously, and in a few days it became the main hub for teachers, pupils and parents.
This resulted in a sharp increase in the traffic and loads that our infrastructure had to endure: in a matter of hours, the average load and traffic more than doubled with peaks of +200%. Fortunately, thanks to the good design of our architecture and to our partner AWS (Amazon Web Services), we managed to make our application scalable, maintaining the same levels of quality and avoiding any disservice.
Our infrastructure uses many AWS products, but the most important at the moment are Ec2 Auto Scaling and Aurora RDS Auto Scaling. With them, the application manages to be elastic according to traffic fluctuations, while still being capable of managing peaks in an optimal way. As a result, we were able to maintain the same latency times that we had before the emergency.
These graphs show how the traffic has doubled on average, with peaks as high as three times as normal.
This emergency has taught us that working well and relying on stable, safe and well-designed infrastructures allows us to make up for difficult situations such as the one we are experiencing right now.
All our work for years has been designed to comply with good technological practices at all levels. This corporate effort, combined with a reliable partner like AWS, has allowed us to face an unexpected scenario in the best way.
