Sector(s)

Team Members

salimlakhani, Amet lenis

Project Team

  • News Agency Technical Team – Defined requirements, validated performance, and ensured compliance alignment.

  • Prime Contractor / Systems Integrator – Oversaw project governance and coordination with government standards.

  • DevPanel Professional Services Team – Architected and implemented the AWS infrastructure, including multi-AZ databases, CDN strategy, blue/green deployments, and auto-scaling tuned for viral traffic patterns

    Learn more https://tidycal.com/devpanel

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

This project highlights how Drupal, combined with DevPanel, can power mission-critical, high-traffic platforms while strengthening the wider community:

  • Proof of Drupal at Extreme Scale: Demonstrates Drupal’s ability to deliver at 11M+ daily hits with traffic surges exceeding 1M per minute—evidence that the CMS can handle workloads usually reserved for custom platforms.

  • Reusable Best Practices: The auto-scaling, blue/green deployment, and CDN optimization strategies developed here can be adapted by other Drupal teams for high-performance projects.

  • Lowering Barriers for Government and News Agencies: Provides a roadmap for organizations with strict compliance needs to confidently adopt Drupal on AWS.

  • Shared Knowledge: By publishing this case study and sponsoring Drupal events, DevPanel helps the community understand how to combine Drupal with modern cloud-native infrastructure to achieve enterprise-grade results.

  • Encouraging Innovation: The project shows how open-source Drupal can outperform costly proprietary hosting platforms when paired with automation and cloud orchestration.

Learn more https://tidycal.com/devpanel

A U.S. government news agency needed to run one of the world’s busiest news sites, handling 11 million daily hits with the ability to instantly scale to over 1 million hits per minute during breaking news. Their existing hosting setup was costly (~$1M annually), lacked flexibility, and couldn’t deliver zero-downtime deployments or government-grade security.

By partnering with DevPanel Professional Services, the agency implemented an enterprise-grade AWS architecture that 99% of teams couldn’t build in-house. The solution included:

  • Multi-AZ distributed databases to eliminate bottlenecks at scale.

  • Auto-scaling tuned for viral traffic patterns, able to ramp from baseline to 1M hits/minute in seconds.

  • Blue/green deployments with one-click rollbacks, ensuring zero downtime releases.

  • Akamai CDN optimized to 74% edge efficiency, protecting origin servers during traffic spikes.

  • Enterprise-grade security and monitoring aligned with federal standards.

The result: performance improved by 10%, costs were cut by more than 75%, and the site now delivers reliable, sub-2-second responses—even during record-breaking traffic surges

About the project

Goals
The agency needed infrastructure capable of powering one of the busiest English-language news sites globally. The objectives were to:

  • Handle 11M+ daily hits and instant spikes of over 1M hits/minute during breaking news.

  • Achieve zero downtime deployments with instant rollback capability.

  • Improve site performance while reducing excessive hosting costs (~$1M annually).

  • Ensure government-grade security and compliance across all layers.

  • Provide developers with reliable tools to focus on publishing and features rather than firefighting infrastructure.

Requirements
The project demanded:

  • Multi-AZ distributed database architecture to eliminate connection bottlenecks.

  • Auto-scaling tuned for viral traffic patterns, scaling in seconds—not minutes.

  • Blue/green deployment infrastructure with automated health checks and one-click rollbacks.

  • Optimized CDN strategy (Akamai) to maximize edge caching efficiency and protect origin servers.

  • Enterprise security features including DDoS protection, compliance monitoring, and detailed audit trails.

Outcome
With DevPanel’s Professional Services, the agency launched an enterprise-grade AWS architecture most teams couldn’t build in-house:

  • Reduced hosting costs by 75%+ while gaining full control in their own AWS account.

  • Performance improved 10% compared to the legacy setup.

  • Zero downtime deployments achieved through blue/green architecture and one-click rollback.

  • Auto-scaling success validated by load testing up to 1.78M hits/minute.

  • CDN efficiency at 74%, keeping origin load manageable (≈2.86M daily hits reaching servers).

  • Response times stayed under 2 seconds, even under extreme load.

The result: a faster, cheaper, and more resilient Drupal platform, ensuring uninterrupted global news delivery no matter the traffic surge

Why Drupal was chosen

For one of the busiest government-backed news platforms in the world, the CMS needed to be secure, scalable, and multilingual—all while supporting continuous publishing during high-traffic surges. Drupal was selected because:

  • Enterprise-grade scalability – With a modular architecture and proven track record, Drupal can power news sites receiving billions of pageviews annually.

  • Multilingual support – Drupal’s core multilingual modules enabled the agency to serve a global audience across regions and languages.

  • Security & compliance – Drupal’s rigorous security practices and strong community response align with federal government security standards.

  • Open-source flexibility – Avoided vendor lock-in while allowing integration with AWS, Akamai CDN, and other government systems.

  • Publishing workflow & editorial tools – Drupal provides customizable workflows for large editorial teams managing 24/7 content production.

Together with DevPanel’s AWS automation and enterprise-grade architecture, Drupal enabled the agency to reliably deliver breaking news worldwide—even under traffic spikes exceeding 1M hits per minute

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

The modules and theme were selected to ensure performance, scalability, and security for one of the world’s busiest news sites:

  • Drupal Core + Multilingual Modules – Gave the editorial team the ability to publish content across regions and languages with a proven, enterprise-ready framework.

  • Views – Allowed flexible, high-performance listings for breaking news, archives, and media without custom coding.

  • Pathauto & Redirect – Maintained SEO consistency and navigation clarity across 11M+ daily requests.

  • Media/CKEditor – Provided an intuitive publishing workflow, enabling large editorial teams to manage rich media without technical barriers.

  • Webform – Supported secure collection of audience feedback and participation features.

  • Security Kit & reCAPTCHA – Hardened the site against common exploits and automated attacks—critical for a government-backed news platform.

  • Custom High-Traffic Theme – Designed for accessibility and fast rendering under extreme load, optimized for mobile-first global audiences.

  • Akamai CDN Integration – Selected to optimize edge caching for frequently updated news, achieving a 74% edge-to-origin efficiency ratio.

  • AWS + DevPanel Integrations – Provided automation for blue/green deployments, monitoring, and elastic scaling, ensuring the CMS could perform reliably under 1M+ spikes per minute.

These choices ensured the platform could deliver news globally, securely, and without interruption—even during record-breaking traffic surges