Portal A12 is the largest conglomerate of outlets owning Catholic content in the country. For more than 10 years on the air, the portal is composed of the websites of the National Shrine of Aparecida, Radio and TV Aparecida, Congregation of Redemptorist Missionaries of São Paulo and Editora Santuário, and its official social networks, which currently broadcast in real time the celebrations of the institution, in addition to hosting another 24 official websites linked to the Sanctuary Group. The portal, which had already migrated its servers to the AWS cloud, noticed a significant increase in demand and the need to improve the stability of its environments.
Challenge
According to Luana Corrêa, coordinator of Online Projects at Portal A12, the greatest need was to ensure that during the peaks of access, the 27 websites that are part of Portal A12 remained stable to support the large number of visits.
“We used to have more than 2 million accesses in common periods and in seasonal periods, such as, for example, in October, when the feast of Our Lady of Aparecida is celebrated, accesses tripled, and our main concern was to be able to support this high demand with total stability and security.” – Luana Corrêa, coordinator of Online Projects at Portal A12.
Thus, Portal A12 needed a solution that was scalable, easy and quick to implement and that also provided elasticity for automated resource adjustments, according to demand.
“Updating our structure with AWS Auto Scaling was crucial to keep all the communication channels of Portal A12 up and running during peak accesses.” – Luana Corrêa
Winnings
Started in October 2019, the project was monitored by Dedalus’ team of experts for the management of its applications, which allowed an initial diagnosis and update of the infrastructure with AWS Auto Scaling to generate greater availability and optimize resources.
“In addition to greater performance and stability, AWS Auto Scaling has generated significant savings, as we don’t have to pay for the same structure as in October throughout the year.” – Luana Corrêa
Ensuring an effective reduction of costs in infrastructure and services was another important point of the project, since, at certain times of the year, the portal needed to invest in increasing the capacity and number of servers to support the large number of accesses.
With the restrictions on masses and in-person events, there was an even greater increase in visitors to the shrine’s portal and streaming channels, as masses and celebrations began to be broadcast on the website and social media platforms. This upgrade provided Portal A12 with immediate gains in stability and operational efficiency, enabling the internal team to focus on strategic activities.
According to the contracted service level, Portal A12 has Dedalus’ 24×7 consulting and coverage and receives a specialist’s evaluation on a monthly basis with recommendations for improvements considering performance, security, costs and business continuity.
“As a non-profit organization and with limited financial resources, the on-demand payment business model was a great benefit for us, in addition to providing and democratizing access to the new technologies available,” adds Luana.
