The Spanish Society of Cardiology (SEC) aims to promote education, prevention and research into cardiovascular health in society, as well as the promotion and dissemination of heart-healthy lifestyle habits among the Spanish population.
Sociedad Española de Cardiología:
Ease of Scaling
What challenge did they face?
The annual congress of the Spanish Society of Cardiology brings together experts from around the world to discuss innovation and share experiences on heart health. The imposition of containment measures decreed by the Government in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic posed a challenge for the celebration of this representative health event.
The organizers realized that the only way to hold the congress was to transform it into a virtual event, which entailed some technical problems. The attendance statistics collected in previous editions, of a face-to-face nature, did not serve to predict the dimensioning of a fully telematic global event. In addition, the client wanted to continue using a third-party video streaming solution that it had used on previous occasions.
The requirements of the client platform were as follows:
- Estimate of up to 10,000 simultaneous users.
- Peak demand from 28 to 31 October.
- Streaming with Streamshark.
- Publication of content on Vimeo for consultation on demand.
- Run every 30 minutes of the enrollment check script for each logged-in user (client development)
- Joomla as CMS
- Plesk as CMS/Server Manager
Implemented solution
apser joined the project at a time of great uncertainty: we conducted a meticulous study of the client’s needs using our ACALIC methodology that allowed us to identify and address all the underlying risks.
apser designed a secure, highly flexible and reliable platform to provide an optimal experience for the many congress attendees from all over the world and, at the same time, integrate custom scripts to verify attendance at third party talks and video broadcasts.
- FrontEnd Web Server: c5.12xlarge instance with Plesk AMI, as management layer. Joomla as CMS of the event website.
- MySQL RDS backend on a m5.2xlarge instance with performance audit.
- Amazon CloudFront for static search via a third-party plugin inside Joomla.
- Monitoring with Amazon Cloudwatch to verify platform performance.
- Amazon Route53.
- Account governance based on AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config and AWS Organizations with SCP’s.
- Amazon GuardDuty for IDS.
Once the platform was deployed, stress tests were performed and applications were optimized until it could be verified that it was working properly for 7,000 simultaneous users.
Results
As attendees closed their sessions on the platform, their feedback on the event was received and, overall, they were very enthusiastic. The eCardio 2020 congress was a resounding success, to the comfort of all organizers.
Finally, the client decided to keep a reduced version of the platform active in order to provide access to the recorded sessions and materials.
To be taken into account
It is always necessary to start from a good platform architecture to offer good performance and not neglect stress and utility tests, as they allow to optimize the size of the platform.
The resources deployed during the week of the congress had a very low cost as they were only operational for ten days. The flexibility provided by AWS to activate resources as needed was essential to the success of the project.
During the event, metrics obtained with Amazon CloudWatch and Performance Insights on RDS were very helpful in solving some minor issues.
Success in this type of project requires a holistic approach involving platform architects, software experts, knowledge of operating systems and management of stress tests.
Why apser
apser is the AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specializing in companies, public administrations, startups and non-profit.
The apser team provides a customized, easy-to-understand and agile approach with the goal of contributing to the widespread adoption of the cloud paradigm.
Our team operates through two business units: Cloud Solutions (acting as a managed services provider) and Cloud Professional Services (acting as a consulting firm).
In 2018 we had our first experience with AWS. Since then, we have not stopped incorporating knowledge and experience that, day by day, help us improve the effectiveness of our clients’ platforms. You can consult here our AWS Validated Qualifications.
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