Keeping a learning platform up when the world moved online overnight
Spring 2020 multiplied our traffic in weeks. The decisions that kept the service up, and the ones we had to unwind later.
· 5 min read · Cozyplus Technologies
When universities closed, students arrived faster than any forecast. Search was the first thing to strain, then the database, then support.
What held
Caching at the edge, read replicas, and a queue in front of anything that wrote to the database. None of it was novel; all of it had been rehearsed.
What we changed afterwards
We wrote down the load numbers, turned the rehearsals into a runbook, and now put that runbook into every government proposal. A citizen portal on the day a tax deadline lands behaves exactly like a study site the night before exams.