For many Australians, the Fires Near Me app was the only indicator for the rapid approach of the raging inferno
Fires Near Me app
As of 14 January 2020, fires this season have burnt an estimated 18.6 million hectares – an area equal to the size of Washington state, and 80 times larger than the total area burned in the 2019 California wildfires.
Fires near me was used in almost every household in Australia.
A testament to solid cloud platform, smart build decisions and a passion to make an impact.
How we dealt with the catastrophic
Arq group identified early in the build some latency and cost usage challenges in the earlier design of the watch zone push notifications. A key feature for the fires near me app. An important customer service requirement was that the system needed to handle 20 million simultaneous connections.
Our scalability test was conducted on lambda, where we were able to deliver 20 million successful notifications over a 6 hour period, during load testing in a single region with no indicated instability.
12 Million push notifications sent
Warning Aussies of the catastrophic fire conditions and total fire ban in place - Tuesday 12th November, 2019
“Besides the heroics and expertise in the field, and coordination of such a massive response to the bush fires, it’s also worth acknowledging the fantastic, understated brilliance of the #nswrfs app which has helped so many of us keep our family’s safe ahead of time. Thank you.”
– Michael Cracroft
Chief Security and Technology Officer, Service NSW
“Please download that Fires Near Me NSW app, you can be ahead of the game by setting watchzones around where you live, where you’ll be. The minute we have intelligences around a fire and its uploaded into our system, you’ll get push notifications from that smartphone app.”
– Shane Fitzsimmons, AFSM
Head of Resilience NSW
(Retired Commissioner of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service)
Built to scale
And the push in that space was that the architecture had to sustain 10 million active users at a single time.
So there were a number of learnings that came out of that. And, post-deployment, it’s more about feature improvement design flow and what else can we can do to improve it.
The power of cloud.
Scaling up when disaster strikes is the ultimate load test.
Fires near me delivered and utilised smart architecture decisions
that ultimately saved lives but also cost effective load balancing.
