About Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Israeli public research university whose website serves applicants, students, faculty and staff.
Ben-Gurion University's public website is where applicants, students, faculty and staff find news, events, programs, faculty pages and staff profiles. It also hosts an Organizational Units subsystem, where each unit runs its own content.
The site holds about 80,000 pages and is edited by around 1,000 people. A relatively small engineering team keeps it running.
What had to be solved
Scale, live traffic and many editors shaped every technical decision.
- Search and navigation had to stay fast across about 80,000 pages.
- Traffic spikes reach around 300 requests per second.
- Staff and research data come from external university systems.
- The live public site had to move from Azure to AWS without any interruption.
- Around 1,000 editors needed safe access limited to their own sections.
How the team built it
Lucene powers a global search that groups results by content type. More than 10 dedicated search pages, for faculties, programs, events, news and more, carry their own filters, all configurable in the back office.
A custom page-level cache records which pages depend on which content. When related content changes, only the affected pages are invalidated.
The application was containerized and moved to ECS Fargate with RDS, S3, ECR and a load balancer. A Windows EC2 bastion runs the import services. Traffic shifted to the new setup gradually.
A daily API import updates 15,000+ staff records, touching only fields that changed and respecting which fields editors may override. A separate CRIS import maps research publications to staff profiles.
A back-office rule engine with AND, OR, NOT, nested conditions and time ranges decides benefit eligibility for reservists. Custom access control limits each editor to specific pages and their children.
What changed
The university now runs a faster, more stable site that its editors manage day to day.
- The Azure to AWS migration finished with zero interruption to the public site.
- Search stays fast and accurate under high load, and page performance improved significantly.
- Complex business rules are managed in the CMS without code changes.
- Around 1,000 editors work safely every day, building pages from 100+ reusable components.
Inside the product
