The General Services Administration (GSA) said today that joint work with the Air Force’s Kessel Run software organization on GSA’s cloud.gov platform has enabled the platform to host 100 million digital users per hour.
Cloud.gov – developed by GSA’s 18F and Technology Transformation Services (TTS) organizations – is a secure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) used by Federal agencies to deliver services in faster and more user-centered ways.
The work to reach the 100 million user-support benchmark took about ten days of collaborative effort, said GSA, which called the success of the effort “a proof of concept for future website development,” and an example of “how Federal agencies can come together to improve customer experience and enhance digital capabilities for the benefit of the public.”
GSA credited Kessel Run’s Bowcaster team with providing “chaos engineering” services to help cloud.gov scale capacity to “100 million post requests per hour.” Among Bowcaster’s contributions were load testing, penetration testing, and “other services that helped ensure the cloud.gov platform could meet availability and resiliency requirements needed to highly trafficked applications as it was scaled up,” GSA said.
“Typically government websites host thousands to tens of thousands of users an hour, but cloud.gov is built to scale, allowing for increased seasonal demand or emergency needs,” explained Lindsay Young, Cloud.gov’s acting director. “This means any government agency can be ready for a surge or need that would amount to up to 100 million users/hour.”
TTS Director Dave Zvenyach said the work is a “great example of an interagency collaboration yielding concrete, scalable results and governmentwide benefits.” The new capability for cloud.gov, he said, “is another milestone in our efforts to improve digital service delivery and ensure an effective, equitable, and secure digital infrastructure for the public.”
