Accenture was able to offer the precise skills needed to design and implement the Royal Wedding website within the compressed time frame of four weeks. The core team leveraged Accenture’s Technology Architecture, Innovation and specialized cloud and security capabilities in our Delivery Centers.
Google helped Accenture leverage Google App Engine, the powerful platform on which the new website was designed and hosted. Google App Engine is offered through the cloud using Google’s own infrastructure, and thus requires none of the traditional software and servers that would have been required by an on-premise solution.
The resulting Royal Wedding website is a Web content management, distribution and blogging application, custom-built in Java and running in the cloud on Google App Engine. The website brought together all of the official social media around the event, and provided direct, easy access to all channels of communication.
The website was designed with extreme scalability in mind, using a combination of page pre-generation, multilevel caching and load balancing—fully utilizing the infrastructure offered by Google App Engine. To prove the scalability, both Google and Accenture executed extensive performance tests on the various layers of the architecture.
With caching disabled, the site was tested to the level of 500 pages per second (40 million per day), without saturating the solution, and still served 95 percent of the pages in less than 1.5 seconds. With caching enabled, Accenture estimated that the site would be able to serve 500 million pages per day, corresponding to between 100 million and 200 million user sessions.