Big data behind Comic Relief’s £75m night

Comic Relief used 10gen’s open source NoSQL database, MongoDB, to create a pioneering platform that was vital in handling this year’s record breaking £75 million event.

Armakuni, the cloud-service technologies provider, was enlisted by Comic Relief to create a flexible and scalable platform that could handle 10,000 concurrent call centre operators and a peak of 500 donations per second.

The solution was developed using 10gen’s open source non-relational database MongoDB, a key component of Armakuni’s platform-as-a-service solution.

For Comic Relief, the UK based charity, fifty minutes of downtime during peak fundraising hours could result in half their annual online donations income being lost. This year there was not a single outage.

“During a national live TV show, the culmination of a 10 week national media onslaught, there is absolutely no second chance to get it right,” explained Tim Savage, co-founder of Armakuni.

“For such a massive project we needed to create something that was flexible but most importantly it had to be reliable and scalable so we could confidently deal with those huge spikes in donations.”

MongoDB fitted those criteria and also worked seamlessly with other solutions needed for the project such as Cloud Foundry.

The system dealt with 600,000 transactions during the seven hour, prime time TV slot and was proved capable of handling peaks of 1200 donations completed per second from web, mobile and call centre users.

The database was also accessible to 10,000 call centre operators who were incentivised  to encourage donations by a gamified view of the results that allowed them to check their totals against their peers.

In the end the platform helped raise more than in any other single night in Comic Relief’s 28-year history with a total of £75,107,851 – passing the previous high of £74,300,000.

“Modern applications need to handle huge spikes in activity while still offering the user an efficient interface to process the data. Armakuni used MongoDB’s flexibility, scalability and reliability to build a platform that could do just that,” said Joe Morrissey,  VP EMEA 10gen, the MongoDB company.

“Dealing with the size, complexity and time pressures of Comic Relief’s data challenge was a massive undertaking. It’s fantastic to see a start-up take on such a mission critical task and we’re extremely proud that MongoDB was involved” added Morrissey.

After the success of this year Armakuni will be doing even more with the MongoDB database for next year’s event as it looks to offer organisers real time analytics.

“The next challenge is crunching data in real time and using the information in even more clever ways,” added Savage.

In previous year's Comic Relief had been delivered via a Java and relational database  model through 12 different partners. This meant there was a lengthy feedback cycle so Comic Relief chose to simplify the delivery with Armakuni.

“This year’s Red Nose Day was a great success. The scalability, flexibility and resilience of the platform meant that, for the first time, the technology was not a limiting factor in raising as much money as possible.” said Phil Latham at Comic Relief.