MTV - Boosting Performance in Finnish Elections
MTV - Boosting Performance in Finnish Elections
The Finnish parliamentary elections 2023 culminated in the vote counting on election night, with hundreds of thousands of visitors flocking to media websites. Learn how MTV and Cirit Oy addressed data processing challenges in election results web application (mtvuutiset.fi/vaalitulokset) and how the use of AWS managed services achieved results, including a 50% improvement in data processing speed.
About MTV
MTV Oy is Finland's leading commercial TV broadcasting company and video content company. It is the home for phenomena, discussion topics and stars.
MTV’s media group includes free TV channels MTV3, Sub, AVA and a free online streaming service MTV Katsomo (mtv.fi, MTV News (mtvuutiset.fi) that shares the latest news in multiple channels and C More pay TV channels. In addition, MTV is responsible for the content of paid streaming service C More and organizes yearly Finland’s biggest discussion forum event, SuomiAreena, in collaboration with the city of Pori.
MTV is part of Telia Company – one of the biggest Nordic TV companies, which is leading the way for the development of the media industry.
Election results application
MTV provides accurate and timely information to its users, and in collaboration with Cirit, this instant transfer of data and timeliness is emphasized in various election events such as parliamentary and presidential elections. MTV has invested in their own election results service, which is integrated as a part of the main news site. During the previous elections in 2022 and 2021, there were challenges with the data processing speed. The app took over four minutes to process the voting data, leading to delays in delivering updates to users. If these challenges were not addressed, users might turn to alternative platforms for election updates.
There were 2 424 candidates in the Finnish Parliamentary elections 2023
Cirit Oy, an AWS Select level partner, was enlisted to tackle these challenges. They leveraged various AWS managed services, including CloudFront, API Gateway, Aurora Postgres Serverless, DynamoDB, Lambdas, CloudWatch, Amazon EventBridge, Secrets Manager, and S3. The election app fetched data files from a remote server every five minutes with lambdas and stored them on S3. This action triggered parallel lambdas to unzip the files and batch store the CSV files into an Aurora Postgres Serverless database. The CloudFront and API gateway cache were then updated with the latest information upon request.
Boosting performance
The implementation of AWS services by Cirit Oy led to significant improvements in the app's performance. Data processing speed increased by 50%, reducing the time from over four minutes to around two minutes. Peak hours saw the app handling 45,000 to 95,000 requests with error rate between 0,5 - 1,75%. The success of this project highlighted the importance of optimizing database functions and keeping the Aurora processing power at 384 ACUs from the beginning of vote counting also played a crucial role in improving performance.
Optimizing database functions brought major performance improvements
Cirit Oy is a software development company specializing in browser-based applications and AWS solutions. With offices in Tampere and Helsinki, their 20 person team is committed to delivering customer-oriented solutions. As an AWS Select level consulting partner, Cirit's certified developers have extensive experience in IoT, data and visualizations in the AWS cloud.
Want to know more?
Contact
Harri Lammi
Director, AWS Partner Lead
harri.lammi@cirit.fi
AWS Community Day Nordics 2023 - Boosting Performance with AWS Serverless in Elections - Harri Lammi