Case Study: Scaling the Adrenaline Max Website for M2THEP on AWS

Customer Challenge

Adrenaline max, originally hosted on infrastructure provided by OVHcloud began to encounter scalability and reliability constraints as audience growth accelerated. While the existing environment was sufficient for steady traffic levels, it was not designed to absorb sudden spikes in concurrent users. 

Ahead of an important deadline, load testing on the original setup revealed a critical failure point at approximately 3,000 concurrent users. Beyond this threshold, Beyond this threshold, the platform experienced a total denial of service, with the infrastructure unable to process incoming requests and the website becoming unavailable under sustained load. The situation highlighted the need for a more elastic infrastructure capable of sustaining traffic spikes without compromising user experience.

Requirements and Objectives

The project was initiated to address immediate scalability concerns while laying a foundation for long-term growth. Key objectives included:

• Supporting significantly higher concurrent user loads
  
• Improving performance under peak traffic conditions
  
• Introducing robust load balancing and caching mechanisms
  
• Migrating from a self-managed MongoDB-compatible database to a managed alternative
  
• Completing the migration within a constrained timeline
  

Implementation

TrackIt migrated the website to Amazon Web Services using an architecture designed to support scalability, resilience, and high performance.

• Amazon CloudFront was deployed as the content delivery layer, caching content at the edge, reducing the application load for read operations and reducing latency for end users.
  
  
• Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributed incoming requests across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, scaling is managed through Auto Scaling Group, enabling automatic horizontal scaling and improved fault tolerance.
  
  
• Amazon DocumentDB replaced the existing MongoDB deployment, providing a fully managed, serverless and scalable document database with high availability.
  
  
• Amazon Route 53 handled DNS and domain management, ensuring reliable routing of traffic to CloudFront.
  
• The application code repository was updated to align with AWS infrastructure requirements, including configuration changes necessary for the new compute and database layers.

The architecture removed single points of failure and allowed the platform to scale predictably in response to traffic demand.

Outcome and Results

Post-migration load testing demonstrated a significant improvement in both scalability and performance.

Measured Results

• Scalability: The platform sustained more than 12,000 concurrent users, a fourfold increase compared to the previous environment.
  
• Performance: End-user latency was reduced through effective edge caching and optimized request routing via CloudFront.
  
• Reliability: Traffic distribution across multiple EC2 instances improved availability during peak loads.
  
• Operational Simplicity: Managed services such as DocumentDB reduced operational overhead and improved overall system stability.