Andes Helps RÚV Deliver Reliable Election Coverage to Hundreds of Thousands of Icelanders Five Times Faster

AWS Partner Andes helped RÚV, Iceland’s largest broadcaster, migrate its election platform to AWS to scale automatically to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, deliver five times faster performance, and decrease feature development time by 50 percent. RÚV worked together with Andes and AWS Professional Services to move its election platform to Amazon Elastic Container Service and AWS Fargate, and Andes also integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows for the election platform.

RÚV needed to improve the performance of its election system, consisting of separate on-air broadcasting and website application environments, and as part of that wanted to connect these two systems together to deliver faster and more enhanced covered between the two platforms. The broadcast system, hosted in a television studio included physical graphics engines, struggled to scale for web delivery and often lacked the responsiveness and latency required to display the same updated content on the RÚV website as was displayed in the Studio. “Our election platform needs to perform extremely fast and with very low latency during live election coverage because the majority of people in Iceland are watching and they expect election results to be updated frequently, both on television and on the web,” says Bragi Reynisson, chief technology officer of RÚV. “Unfortunately, the system failed during live broadcasts because of performance problems, and the solution itself was complex to maintain.”

In addition, RÚV wanted to give its developers more time to create new customer-facing features. “We were spending too much time on managing scalability and maintaining the system,” says Reynisson. “We needed to help our developers create features faster in response to broadcasters who were asking for more system updates.”

For several years, RÚV worked with Andes, an Iceland-based AWS Partner, on IT initiatives. RÚV chose to continue this relationship by engaging Andes and AWS Professional Services to help migrate its election broadcasting system and website to AWS. “We had a strong relationship with Andes, so we trusted them to help us get our system up and running on AWS, which we knew would improve performance and simplify IT management,” Reynisson says.

Andes refactored and architected the RÚV election system, including the on-air broadcasting platform and website, and migrated it to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), while also implementing AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine that simplifies RÚV container scaling. “We wanted to architect the system in a modern way and bring it to AWS to help developers focus on creating new features instead of managing Kubernetes clusters,” says Ari Viðar Jóhannesson, chief executive officer of Andes. Andes also helped RÚV implement Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network service that RÚV uses to improve caching. RÚV also takes advantage of Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service that improves web application performance by retrieving information from in-memory caches instead of disk-based databases. The new election system includes the on-air broadcast platform and the website application environment, both running in parallel on AWS.

After migrating to AWS, Andes also integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows for all products within the RÚV election system. Andes then developed a module that RÚV used to integrate authentication in all election applications, including the broadcast platform and websites. “As a state broadcaster, security is a key factor in all our technologies,” says Reynisson. “We wanted to ensure we were well-protected on AWS, and Andes helped us do that.” RÚV relies on AWS Certificate Manager for provisioning, managing, and deploying private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates.

By automating scalability, RÚV gained the on-demand compute power it needed to prepare for the high volume of online traffic expected during the May 14, 2022, municipal elections in Iceland. “Moving our election platform to AWS gave us great confidence that we could support peak traffic during election coverage,” says Reynisson. “At one point, we had 100,000 concurrent users, many of whom had switched over to watching the Eurovision Song Contest—the biggest television show in the country. Nearly the entire nation was watching election coverage on RÚV television broadcasts and on the website, and our platform scaled to support it because of AWS.”

Because AWS scales automatically between both the RÚV broadcast platform and the website, RÚV no longer needs to be concerned about issues with one of the systems. “If there is a problem on one of the platforms, it doesn’t impact the other platform,” Reynisson says. “That’s critical, because our election system is the main attraction on election night, and we can’t allow the platform to be unavailable.”

RÚV greatly improved broadcast platform and website performance by migrating to AWS and taking advantage of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon ElastiCache. “Our response time is five times faster on AWS compared with our previous on-premises solution,” says Reynisson. As a result, election night web users saw results milliseconds after the RÚV election committee announced the results on the on-air broadcast system. “As a result of lower latency and better responsiveness, we can deliver a better overall experience for viewers watching live election coverage. In addition, with Amazon CloudFront, we increased our reliability,” Reynisson says.

By introducing a CI/CD pipeline for developers, Andes helped RÚV accelerate new feature development. “Introducing a CI/CD pipeline was a game-changer for our developers that resulted in a 50 percent decrease in development time per feature,” says Reynisson. “Now, instead of spending our development resources on maintaining a Kubernetes cluster, our developers can focus on building new features for our broadcasters.”

RÚV and Andes will continue working together to ensure the RÚV election platform is ready for Iceland’s next election cycle. “AWS gives us the scalability, reliability, and performance we need,” Reynisson concludes. “We have the right solution in place for future elections.”