How Aarogya Setu is addressing scale and security challenges

Security safeguards

The security safeguards were crucial as the team had expected the platform to be targeted by threat actors that were eyeing its data. True enough, the platform’s firewalls and security policies had blocked traffic from between 20,000 and 25,000 IP addresses and identities, Sahni said.

There were also distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, as well as targeted attacks by some renowned hackers, but Sahni said nothing came out of those attempts.

Besides fending off cyber threats, the development team had to ensure the platform could scale with the rapid growth in the number of users. Within 13 days since Aarogya Setu was made available, the app recorded 50 million downloads, surpassing a previous record set by Pokemon Go.

Sahni said to build the most scalable platform possible, the team developed microservices, built data pipelines and leveraged NoSQL databases, so that data can be distributed quickly and scale well. At one point, the contact-tracing app recorded seven million server requests in just one minute.

As an early adopter of New Relic, a cloud-based application to help developers track the performances of their services, Sahni looked to the vendor to understand the scale issues that Aarogya Setu could face.

At the time, the Indian government had also joined New Relic’s Covid-19 relief programme, which provides 90 days of full-stack observability, with support that has since been extended for an additional three months for Aarogya Setu.

Knowing that the team needed to be well prepared for a huge wave of demand, the government felt that visibility into the technology and user experience was essential as the app became widely adopted. “With a roll-out at this size and scale, not having effective monitoring and visibility would have meant that we wouldn’t have been able to live up to the expectations of our citizens,” a government official said.

“Technology roll-outs will tend to fail at one point or another, but the most important thing is how quickly businesses can bounce back from these failures. New Relic allowed us to identify gaps of where we could have done better and ensured that any issues that occurred were addressed quickly,” she added.

For example, there was once when the team encountered a longer than usual response time, which was eventually traced to the way a database was configured. Sahni said these issues would have been hard to resolve without the use of New Relic.