# Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 1

DevFeed: [Scaling Findmypast for 1921 Census release - Part 1](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/scaling-findmypast-for-1921-census-release-part-1-19746.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://tech.findmypast.com/scaling-fmp-part-1/>)

Author: Mike Thomas

Published: 2022-01-31T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Findmypast](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/findmypast.md>)

Topics: [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>), [Kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kubernetes.md>), [Testing](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/testing.md>), [Back end](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/backend.md>), [telemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/telemetry.md>)

Tags: [chaos](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/chaos.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data.md>), [findmypast](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/findmypast.md>), [infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure.md>), [k8s](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/k8s.md>), [kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kubernetes.md>), [load](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/load.md>), [metrics](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/metrics.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [release](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/release.md>), [stress](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/stress.md>), [testing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/testing.md>)

## AI overview

Findmypast describes how its engineering team prepared for the 1921 Census of England & Wales release, anticipating a 12-fold increase in users. The article covers a scaling working group, performance improvements, service metrics, chaos and stress testing, and mapping dependencies across nearly 140 Kubernetes-based microservices.

## Source excerpt

Findmypast (FMP) released the 1921 Census of England & Wales at midnight on Jan 6th 2022 to an eager community of genealogists. The preparation of the census - preservation, digitisation and transcription took three years of hard work. Aside from the data preparation, we also had technical challenges to address. Specifically, could our services deal with the projected increase in users for the first few days of 1921 launch period? This post is the first in a series that details how we approached scaling our service to deal with a projected day one 12x increase of users. In the beginning... ..way back in Nov 2020 the release of the 1921 census was just over 13 months away. Within engineering, our thoughts started to turn to ensuring that Findmypast was fit to meeting the anticipated increase in load. We knew from previous incidents that the reliability and performance of some of the services can cause issues when under load, so, within engineering, we started a scaling working group to address not only these specific issues, but to prove to management and our external stakeholders that the system as a whole was resilient and could perform well under load. The expectations for the working group was to: Champion performance improvements within the team. That is, evangelise scaling to the team, make sure that backend improvement work was added to backlogs, scheduled into sprints, etc. Ensure that the key metrics for each service owned by the team were correctly instrumented, visualised and alerted upon. Schedule time for chaos and stress testing team services. The initial meeting set the goals and expectations for the team and also discussed a few incidents that caused a site outages due to cascading failures and the like. Essentially, we highlighted the things that have gone wrong in the past and the discussed areas that would have limited the blast impact of the outage. We also re-visited our documentation, we have almost 140 micro services running in Kubernetes (K8s) a