We knew right away that we wanted to support the project, since it gave us the opportunity to put our know-how to use in fighting the pandemic – even if only in a small way.
The application itself is relatively simple: it just stores the questionnaire data in a database. There is also an export interface through which the raw data can be retrieved for further processing. However, since the application could potentially be used by a very large number of people across Switzerland at the same time, we focused especially on the system's performance and stability.
Our hosting partner Nine Internet Solutions promptly provided a managed Kubernetes cluster on which we could deploy our application. Although our Spring Boot applications are well suited for deployment on container platforms, we host most of our projects on virtual servers. So we were glad to take the opportunity to try out a deployment on a Kubernetes cluster!
Thanks to auto-scaling, the application performed outstandingly in the load test: 1.6 million requests within 15 minutes, which works out to around 1,800 requests per second.