FIFA World Cup | Hyundai

A custom-built Tumblr site was created to promote the FIFA World Cup event, sponsored by Hyundai.

With this interactive website, users could create and share their animated artwork via social media as MEMEs. Each piece was commissioned by an illustrator specifically for this event. In addition to sharing, users had the option to locate national viewing parties using a custom styled map developed with Google APIs.

I configured a cluster of load balanced servers that included webservers with LAMP stacks, database, CMS, and processing servers. Each webserver’s Apache setup was tuned for performance minimizing child processes, and disabling .htaccess support amongst other optimizations.

The master webserver ran as an Lsyncd daemon for parallel file replication over a Secure Shell (SSH). The real-time social media scrapping was performed using a Node.js-based processing server, which then reverse proxied via Nginx. Sockets were proxied through Nginx to the Node.js backend, allowing time-sensitive game updates to be sent to the browser fast while providing an extra level of security.

I worked extensively with an event launch team (formed specifically for this project) at Rackspace, to prepare this project for the projected traffic conditions and to improve server-side security.