The challenge
The BBC needed reliable live broadcast applications. Events with tens of thousands of people watching simultaneously. Infrastructure that could not fail during a live broadcast. Zero tolerance for downtime.
This is a genuinely different engineering problem from most web development. The concern isn't whether the site looks good or converts well — it's whether it stays up when 25,000 people hit it at exactly the same moment.
The approach
The architecture was designed from the ground up for peak load, not average load. Caching strategies, CDN configuration, database query optimisation, and load testing at scale — all of it done before a single user arrived.
The live broadcast context adds a particular pressure. You can't roll back during a broadcast. You can't push an emergency fix mid-show. Everything has to work, and it has to work before the cameras start rolling.
This required a rigorous approach to testing and deployment: comprehensive pre-launch checks, staged rollouts where possible, and clear rollback procedures that could be executed in under two minutes if needed.
The result
100% uptime across all live broadcast events. The applications handled peak loads of 25,000 concurrent users without degradation.
What this number represents isn't just a technical achievement — it's the confidence that comes from knowing the work was done properly. Every caching layer was tested. Every database query was profiled. Every potential failure point was addressed before it became a problem.
The BBC's standard for technical reliability is genuinely high. Meeting it consistently is something I'm proud of.