Home Case Studies COVID Vaccine Portal
GOVERNMENT · CALIFORNIA · 2021

Built California's COVID-19 vaccine record portal in 14 days. Kept it online for 39 million residents.

When California needed a statewide digital service at pandemic pace, the deadline wasn't negotiable. We built the foundation, hardened it for citizen scale, and operated it through the peak.

Government Cloud Infrastructure DevSecOps 39M+ Users
COVID-19 VACCINE PORTAL

14

Days.

Concept to production.

CLIENT CA Dept. of Public Health
INDUSTRY Government
SERVICES Cloud · DevSecOps · SRE
TIMELINE Q1 2021 · 14-day launch
SCALE 39M+ residents served
STATUS Multi-year · Ongoing
THE CHALLENGE

Build a statewide vaccine portal in 14 days, scale it for 39 million residents, and never let it go down.

California needed a digital vaccine record service that worked on day one of a national rollout — no soft launch, no beta period. The portal had to handle tens of millions of concurrent users, integrate with existing state health systems, meet HIPAA-level privacy requirements, and be accessible to every Californian regardless of device or connectivity.

"Failure wasn't a deployment issue. It was a public health issue."

OUR APPROACH

Five phases. Fourteen days. Zero compromises.

01

Triage architecture

Within 48 hours, we mapped the integration surface and identified the three highest-risk dependencies. No design phase — just the architecture that would survive contact with reality.

02

Build in parallel

Three teams ran simultaneously: front-end portal, identity integration, and infrastructure provisioning. Each shipped to staging within 5 days.

03

Harden for scale

Load-tested at 10× projected concurrent users. Found three bottlenecks, fixed them before launch. Auto-scaling configured for 50M+ residents.

04

Launch and stabilize

Live on day 14. Watched the dashboards for 72 hours straight. Pushed three hotfixes during the first peak traffic window.

05

Operate at scale

Transitioned to managed operations within 30 days of launch. Have operated the portal continuously for every Californian since.

RESULTS · MEASURABLE OUTCOMES

Built for citizen scale. Operated through the peak.

14 days

Concept to production

No soft launch. No beta period.

39M+

Residents served

Every Californian with a vaccine record

99.97%

Uptime since launch

Including pandemic peak traffic

0

Critical security incidents

HIPAA-aligned from day one

TECHNOLOGIES

The stack behind the portal.

CLOUD
AWS CloudFront Aurora ElastiCache
FRONTEND
React Node.js GraphQL
DEVSECOPS
Terraform GitHub Actions Vault
OBSERVABILITY
Datadog PagerDuty Prometheus
COMPLIANCE
HIPAA NIST SOC 2
"

Tek Yantra didn't approach this like a vendor. They approached it like Californians who needed the system to work. When the dashboards spiked at launch, their team was on the call with ours within five minutes.

MC

Michael Cave

Chief Product Officer

CA Office of Digital Innovation

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