Engineering a Scalable and Secure Digital Platform for International Yoga Day 2026
1.9B
Website visits
600K
Peak concurrent users
200K+
Certificates issued
0
Production incidents
Client Overview
Digital India Corporation (DIC) is a not-for-profit organization set up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, to drive the vision of Digital India through e-governance, digital public infrastructure, and technology-led citizen services. AppSquadz has partnered with DIC across multiple digital initiatives, providing AWS infrastructure and cloud engineering support for national-scale platforms. International Yoga Day 2026 was one such engagement. It is a nationwide digital platform enabling registrations, participation, and certificate distribution for millions of citizens simultaneously, requiring infrastructure with zero tolerance for downtime or security incidents.
Client
Digital India Corporation (DIC)
Industry
Government / Public Sector
Requirement
Build and validate scalable, secure AWS infrastructure capable of absorbing unpredictable, massive traffic surges for the International Yoga Day 2026 digital platform, while maintaining continuous availability and complete security.
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Executive Summary
International Yoga Day 2026 witnessed unprecedented digital participation, with millions of users accessing the official portal to register, participate, and download certificates. To prepare for this global event, the engineering team carried out a comprehensive infrastructure readiness program that included compute optimization, database scaling, performance testing, application observability, and operational planning.
During the peak event window, the platform successfully supported approximately 1.9 billion website visits, handled nearly 600,000 concurrent users, and facilitated the issuance of more than 200,000 participation certificates. Despite the enormous traffic volume, the platform remained fully operational with no production incidents, no service degradation, and no security events.
About the Event
International Yoga Day, observed globally on 21 June, marks the United Nations' 2014 resolution recognizing yoga's role in promoting physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, a resolution led by India and adopted with record global co-sponsorship. Each year's observance draws participation across ministries, state governments, educational institutions, and citizens nationwide, coordinated through a "whole-of-government, whole-of-society" approach with digital platforms playing an increasingly central role in outreach and participation.
For the 2026 edition, that digital outreach translated into a platform expected to serve millions of citizens simultaneously, handling registrations, live participation, and certificate distribution in real time. This scale, combined with the visibility of a national government initiative, meant the underlying infrastructure carried zero margin for downtime, latency, or security compromise. Engineering that infrastructure was AppSquadz's responsibility, in partnership with DIC.
Challenges They Faced
- Unpredictable Peak Traffic: A national event with no historical benchmark for expected concurrent load, requiring infrastructure that could scale on demand without advance certainty of peak volume.
- Zero Tolerance for Downtime: Any service degradation during the event window would directly impact millions of citizens attempting to register and download certificates in real time.
- Database Performance at Scale: Transactional workloads (registrations, certificate issuance) needed to remain fast and consistent even under extreme concurrent load.
- Security at National Scale: A high-visibility government platform is a target for malicious traffic; security monitoring needs to operate continuously without impacting performance.
- Operational Coordination: Multiple infrastructure domains (compute, database, network, application, security) needed real-time visibility and rapid response capability throughout the event window.
Solutions We Offered
- Unpredictable Peak Traffic: Reconfigured Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with a desired capacity of 15 instances and maximum capacity of 40, behind an Application Load Balancer, allowing the platform to scale seamlessly with real-time demand.
- Zero Tolerance for Downtime: Migrated application servers to Amazon EC2 c7i.2xlarge instances for improved compute efficiency and validated the entire setup with Apache JMeter load testing simulating ~40,000 concurrent users on the landing page alone, with equivalent testing across other critical workflows.
- Database Performance at Scale: Upgraded Amazon RDS PostgreSQL from db.m6g.4xlarge to db.m6g.8xlarge to support high-volume transactional workloads without latency.
- Security at National Scale: Deployed AWS WAF for real-time malicious traffic filtering and Amazon CloudFront for accelerated, protected content delivery.
- Operational Coordination: Enabled Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Amazon CloudWatch across all EC2 instances and ran a centralized bridge call on event day with dedicated engineers covering compute, database, networking, application health, and security.
Project Overview
AppSquadz delivered the AWS infrastructure behind International Yoga Day 2026 through proactive capacity planning, comprehensive load testing, database scaling, and coordinated real-time monitoring. The platform supported approximately 1.9 billion website visits and a peak of 600,000 concurrent users, issuing more than 200,000 participation certificates with zero production incidents and zero security events.
AWS Services Used
Summary
InfoRequest counts for all traffic during the specified time range.
Total
5.33M
Compared to
120.28M
Allowed
5.33M
Compared to
120.07M
Blocked
3.77K
Compared to
211.59K
Results
Supported approximately 1.9 billion website visits during the event window without service degradation.
Handled a peak of 600,000 concurrent users with stable response times throughout.
Enabled the issuance of 200,000+ participation certificates without delay or error.
Sustained 43.8+ million CloudFront requests per hour at peak load.
- CloudFront efficiently served traffic while maintaining low error rates, and backend target health remained stable throughout the event.
- AWS WAF automatically filtered unwanted traffic; no production-impacting security incidents or high-severity threats were observed.
- Delivered zero production incidents and zero security events.
Yoga Sangam Post Event Dashboard
Track and analyze Yoga Sangam post-event data with clear metrics and dashboard insight.
18,670,383,691
TOTAL PARTICIPANTS
577,566
TOTAL UPLOADED PHOTOS
200,112
TOTAL CERTIFICATES ISSUED
Vishal Deep Prajapati
Chief Technology Officer, DevOps
Project Delivery Leadership
Vishal Deep Prajapati is the CTO at AppSquadz, leading DevOps and cloud infrastructure with a sharp focus on AWS services. He champions robust, scalable infrastructure solutions that drive operational reliability and efficiency, with deep expertise in automating deployment pipelines, managing containerized environments, and provisioning secure, high-performance AWS architectures. For International Yoga Day 2026, Vishal led the infrastructure strategy end-to-end, from auto-scaling and database architecture through live event-day operations, ensuring the platform stayed fast, secure, and available across 1.9 billion visits and 600,000 concurrent users, with zero incidents.
AWS & cloud infrastructure • CI/CD & infrastructure as code • Containerized environments • DevOps leadership
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