AutoScaling AWS Infrastructure to Handle 10× On-Demand Load Efficiently
Optimizing application performance during peak load with effortless scalability.
Our client’s application kept crashing whenever a school logged in all at once. The architecture could handle about 6 000 users before tipping over, and scaling lagged behind demand. But the real‑world use case—an entire school district logging in simultaneously—wasn’t going away. They needed infrastructure that could flex up quickly during business hours and drop costs after hours.
Challenges
- Crashes caused by sudden spikes: Unpredictable bursts of user activity brought the application down.
- Slow to scale up: AWS resources were not spinning up quickly enough, so concurrent users were capped at ~6,000.
- Concurrency across an entire school: It is not unusual for every student, teacher, and admin to try and log in at the same time.
- Demand for availability: The platform had to remain responsive and usable no matter how many people signed in at the same time.
The Solution
- We developed a capacity planning strategy that took advantage of both business days and business hours.
- API endpoints were optimized, Apache configs were tuned to handle more concurrent connections, AWS Auto Scaling rules were set based on CPU utilization, and a reader-writer pattern allowed the database to take additional load.
- Heavy downloads and exports were queued and offloaded into a job queue.
- At peak hours, multiple instances of ECS and RDS were spun up automatically; after hours and weekends, the environment scaled back down so that you weren't consuming costs for resources that weren't being used.
The Impact
With Knackforge Cloud Services in place, the customer experienced:
- 10× scalability: The infrastructure scales up and down 10 times (and beyond) on demand.
- 100,000 concurrent users: The platform now supports an entire district (logging in at the same time) indefinitely.
- No degradation: Even at peak load pages load quickly, and transactions are seamless.
- Cost control: Shut down the extra instances outside business hours, and the monthly cost of AWS is much less than it would be without a plan.
Technologies Used:
- AWS Auto Scaling
- AWS ECS
- AWS RDS
- PHP Laravel