ThoughtWorks Helps Drive Over A$ 30 million in Queensland Flood Relief Donation

Immediately after devasting floods in northeast Australia that displaced over 200,000 people and caused AU$5 billion of damage, Smart Service Queensland, part of the Queensland Government, was called on to support a nationwide fund-raising telethon to help those affected. The existing donation application, however, was not designed for use on such a large scale. Officials were concerned how well it and the supporting infrastructure would cope under the load that could come during the planned broadcast.

ThoughtWorks has been a key partner of Smart Service Queensland for several years, and as soon as client principal Julian Oliver heard about the issue, he offered to help out. With a few phone calls, he was able to make a team of ThoughtWorks developers available at no cost—but it was less than three days before the start of the telethon.

Planning for the unknown—the answer is in the Cloud

The team decided to attack the problem from two directions. Some would try to shore up the existing application to handle higher volumes. The others would attempt a “Plan B”—to design, develop and deploy a new, more robust, donation website from the ground up, as a backup for the telethon.

The biggest concern was the amount of traffic. With no way to predict the public's response to a national television appeal, the application had to be ready for anything. The “Plan B” team chose Ruby on Rails as the platform, for development speed, and chose to deploy to Heroku, a cloud service for hosting highly scalable Ruby applications, knowing that Heroku could meet high traffic demands seamlessly by increasing computing resources as required during the telethon. The new site would be linked to an external payment service on the backend to address issues of privacy and security that would be otherwise impossible to address in time.

By the end of Saturday, just 48 hours from beginning the work, the “Plan B” developers had a website up and running on 5 Heroku application instances, with a 6th instance running background jobs - sending donor confirmation emails - and the dedicated PostgreSQL database server.

“Plan B” to the rescue

The day of the Telethon, as feared, the main donations application failed due to overload at the outset. The “Plan B” application on Heroku was live and as the show went on, it operated seamlessly. It easily handled all online donations as well as many from the Call Centre.

In about two hours the new site collected over AU$2 million. Since the end of the telethon the traffic load has dropped, but the site remains active, processing a steady stream of donations.

ThoughtWorks received a commendation from the Premier of the State of Queensland for our pro bono service in partnership with Smart Service Queensland and the national telethon. Over AU$42 million have been collected through the site so far, all to benefit the flood victims.

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