DOL – CDN and Cloud DR for Highly Available Website

Summary

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) within the Department of Labor (DOL) publishes market moving employment and unemployment statistics. The ability to control the timing of the data released on the website and handling the sudden surge in traffic required a scalable solution that included a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a fail-over website within the AWS cloud for handling the traffic surge.

Solution

stackArmor designed and developed a website publishing and management system using the Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a DR website within the AWS East Region using a blue/green deployment model to ensure a “fail-safe” mechanism to release data at a very specific time. The Akamai Digital Site Accelerator (DSA) solution was selected given that it is a FedRAMP accredited service to provide edge based access to the website for allowing traffic offloading and reducing origins website load. The AWS East Region was used to host a html website that provided a publishing and staging site with the latest data. Specific services using included AWS EC2, Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), EBS and Multiple Availability Zones (AZ) within the East Region.