Google Developer Products Help WhiteHouse.gov Connect With America
Last Thursday was a momentous day for citizen participation in government.
As you may have heard, President Obama
hosted the first online Town Hall meeting with questions submitted and voted on via the
internet. The Developer team at Google is honored that two of our technologies,
App Engine
and
Google Web Toolkit, played a role in making this
possible.
Google Moderator, built with App Engine and Google Web
Toolkit, allows users to submit and vote on questions collaboratively. Originally developed
for Google company meetings, it's now available for anyone to use -- but being featured on
WhiteHouse.gov offered an unprecedented level of potential traffic and attention. We are
thrilled that, thanks to scalable hosting provided by App Engine, Moderator successfully
handled traffic from tens of thousands of simultaneous visitors.
During
the 48-hour open voting period, the site peaked at 700 hits per second, and 92,934 people
submitted 104,073 questions and cast 3,605,984 votes. In total, over one million unique
visitors visited the site before the town hall. Even while the site was featured on major news
outlets and even the Google homepage the other 50,000 apps built on App Engine were fully
supported and experienced no adverse effects.
Since the front-end of
Moderator was written using GWT, most user interaction with the site was handled via AJAX
requests made from the browser to the server. This enabled a very responsive UI while at the
same time keeping bandwidth down. It also made it easy to make some last-minute adjustments to
the UI, while ensuring that the JavaScript was compatible with all browsers and all
platforms.
As would be expected when a website is utilized by the White
House and is featured in the media, there were dramatic, and sometimes unforeseen, upswings in
traffic. The graph below shows some of the major surges in load to which App Engine adapted.
Conventional web hosting strategies demand the pre-provisioning of enough servers to handle
load. Sometimes, as was the case with Moderator on WhiteHouse.gov, accurate traffic estimates
can be difficult to develop ahead of time. Fortunately, since Moderator runs on App Engine,
all servers and resource allocation were handled automatically. With App Engine, you never
need worry whether you've set up enough machines...we'll automatically spin up new servers as
traffic grows.
If you
haven't tried App Engine yet, we encourage you to join the 150,000 developers who have already
built highly scalable web applications on top of Google's computing infrastructure. To learn
more, visit
code.google.com/appengine/ and make plans
to attend our sessions at
I/O at the end of May.
By Mike Repass, Product Manager, App
Engine
