Newsletter
Meet Our Guardian - GE2025 Support
15 October 2025
In our latest spotlight, we sat down with Dawson Tan, APEX Cloud’s lead technical operations manager, who has been instrumental in ensuring seamless election support through our platform. As elections demand the highest levels of system reliability and performance, Dawson and APEX team work tirelessly behind the scenes to maintain the intuitive dashboard that consolidates key performance metrics, system logs and alert notifications into a single view, allowing the operations team with real-time monitoring while maintaining optimal performance during high-stake periods.
Left to right: Bharanidharan Selvaraj, Dawson Tan, Alistair Kee from APEX team
1. What was the first thought that crossed your mind when you learned the product would be involved in supporting the event?
My first thought was whether APEX Cloud's architecture and automated failover could handle the expected load. While our system already processes over 3 million daily calls with auto-scaling, I wanted to ensure we could manage sudden traffic surges effectively.
We conducted multiple load tests in the live environment at varying transaction rates to monitor API gateway performance and identify potential bottlenecks. As an additional precaution, we pre-scaled our infrastructure before the event. These measures allowed us to handle the increased traffic smoothly without affecting other tenants on our shared infrastructure.
2. What steps do we take to make sure all support personnel are fully prepared to respond effectively during this event?
We refined our existing runbook to support an expanded team beyond our regular personnel, making it highly actionable and role specific. Since support was distributed across three locations including the main operations room, we ensured tight alignment with communication and escalation protocols for consistent responses.
We conducted briefings and just-in-time training sessions so everyone understood their responsibilities and could respond quickly. This preparation streamlined incident handling and improved cross-team coordination under pressure.
3. What are the key factors that contribute to the success of such a critical event?
Success depends on thorough preparation, clear communication, and effective monitoring. Key elements include well-defined runbooks, experienced support personnel, reliable alerting systems, and strong support from the APEX Cloud engineering team. Strategic guidance from senior management at both CEP and GovTech levels, along with contingency plans and smooth cross-team collaboration, ensures we can promptly address challenges and maintain stability throughout the event.