Case Study: Students’ Union Management System achieves faster peak traffic scaling with Lambert Labs and AWS Fargate

Students’ Union Management System (sums) cuts autoscaling wait time to under 1 minute with Lambert Labs

Students’ Union Management System (SUMS), a UK-based platform for managing student unions and event ticketing, struggled with website slowdowns and failed transactions during unpredictable spikes in traffic caused by ticket sales. Their existing infrastructure on AWS Elastic Beanstalk could not scale quickly enough, leading to a poor user experience. To solve this, they engaged vendor Lambert Labs to migrate their application to a more scalable service.

Lambert Labs migrated the SUMS application to Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate and implemented a custom CloudWatch metric for autoscaling to replace the default CPU utilization. This change reduced the scaling response time from several minutes to under one minute, allowing the platform to seamlessly handle over 1,000 requests per second. The solution provided by Lambert Labs dramatically improved performance during peak sales and reduced operational overhead for the customer.

Students’ Union Management System (sums)