Smooth sailing—and scaling—to the cloud
The Visus team started by upgrading the USA Swimming website to Sitefinity version 15.1, which comes with the ability to create a .NET Core application. “.NET Core provides us scalability, which is really nice for handling website traffic. We can have as many .NET Core front-end applications as we want, but we still only need one back-end application running,” Grosser explained. “Visus supported our team as they did load testing with thousands of simultaneous users, and the new site handled it without a hiccup.”
In addition to handling a sudden influx of traffic, the USA Swimming website also needed constant updates to reflect the most current news, events, and competition results, and Sitefinity offered a built-in feature that could streamline those updates—with no extra development required.
“Visus and our team don't need to do any additional work on the pages themselves because the data just flows in,” Grosser said. “We can add events, news, videos, and other details very easily at the back end, and those automatically populate to the pages of the website.”
Then, to set the USA Swimming website up for success and scalability in the future, Visus migrated USA Swimming's website datacenter from on-premises hardware in Colorado to the Azure cloud-based platform as a service in only 90 days—and just in time for the 2024 Olympic trials.
“Sometimes we can predict when peak website traffic will occur, but unexpected elevated traffic could [also] be driven by a new world record or breaking news about a popular athlete,” said Grosser. “Microsoft Azure automatically scales to handle the load, and that on-demand scalability is very valuable for us. We now have an extremely agile framework thanks to Visus.”
After moving to Azure, the USA Swimming website was well prepared for the spike in traffic that the 2024 Olympics brought. “During the 2024 Games after the Visus engagement, not only did our website not crash, but we also never even saw slowing load times,” said Grosser. “Everything was seamless, even during peak times with millions of visitors to the site.”