The Postal Service turned to cloud to handle the demand for COVID-19 test kits, which reached ten million COVID-19 test kit orders per hour at its peak. In just the first two days of the operation, 54 million orders were accepted.
In addition to its AWS systems, the Postal Service relied on a second cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, for extra security and to ease nerves. For Mehra and her team, redundancy was key, a sentiment echoed by many analysts and industry leaders.
Once the technology was put into place, the agency needed to ensure that people wouldn’t take advantage of the free tests. For security, USPS used multiple AWS-native services to protect the site and the APIs. The Web Application Firewall (WAF) is the service the agency spent the most time tweaking, Mehra said.
“We had a lot of kids and friends trying to game the system, and I told them, ‘No, sir, it’s not going to happen,’” said Mehra.