When Vega first came to us, their editorial platform was buckling under its own success. Traffic was climbing fast, but every breaking-news spike brought the site to a crawl — and for a newsroom, a slow site during a major story is a missed moment. Our brief was clear: rebuild the stack so it could absorb sudden surges without blinking.
The challenge
News traffic is uniquely spiky. A normal Tuesday afternoon can turn into a ten-times traffic event the instant a story breaks. The legacy platform rendered every page on demand, hit the database for each request, and had no meaningful caching layer. It worked — until thousands of readers arrived at once.
We identified three core problems early:
- Every article view triggered multiple uncached database queries.
- The publishing workflow and the public site shared the same infrastructure, so editorial activity competed with reader traffic.
- There was no way to push a story live instantly without a full cache purge.
“The new platform didn’t just get faster — it changed how our newsroom works. We publish without fear of the traffic.”
Our approach
We separated concerns from the ground up. The newsroom CMS now runs on isolated infrastructure, publishing to a fast, statically-served read layer with a real-time invalidation pipeline. Editors hit publish, and the story is live globally within seconds — no full purge, no waiting.
Edge caching & instant invalidation
Every article is cached at the edge and served in milliseconds. When an editor updates a story, only the affected pages are invalidated — surgically, not site-wide. This is what lets Vega publish a live blog that updates every few seconds while still serving cached pages to millions.
Scaling the reader experience
The read layer scales horizontally and independently of the CMS. A traffic spike never touches the editorial tools, so journalists keep working at full speed even during the busiest news events of the year.