What Has Technology Got to Do with Valentines Day?
Valentines Day is a very powerful holiday. I should explain that I’m not talking here about my love life here, although that would make for another interesting story. This is about my days in an internet company when I managed about 300 web servers as the CTO. For many technologists with similar responsibilities, Valentines Day can be a force to be reckoned with. Let me explain.
Traditional web server based operations
Many web-based businesses experience a sudden and extraordinary hike in traffic during Valentine’s Day. Take for example, online greeting cards. In a span of 48 hours, you can see the total traffic hitting hundred million or more. The problem faced by technical teams is to plan for these 48 hours, and that inevitably means scaling your infrastructure. Typically, the time required for such preparation is a week to ten days, depending on the scale. On the tail end of the event, you need to give another week for all messages and information to be retrieved by users. In other words, let’s say you send a Valentine’s card on the 13th. The recipient may not access the internet on that day, or the next – but perhaps several days later.
You may have to hire dedicated servers for a month (a month being a typical minimum period for hiring dedicated servers). The real cost of managing peak traffic for 48 hours is actually the cost for that whole month. If you add 200 servers for Valentine’s Day, your expenditure is $200,000 at $1000 rental per server. This includes the cost of high speed internet access for those servers. This, of course, is prohibitively high.
And that’s only one example. I’m sure you can think of many other web services which are similar in nature.
Cloud services to the rescue!
The best part about a cloud service is scaling. Many cloud service providers have an auto-scaling feature where the capacity is automatically scaled up on demand. This feature no doubt has saved many online entities from server crashes during critical stages when there is a traffic surge. In the case of the example I mentioned, you can plan for an expansion in infrastructure which would last for say three days: the D-day itself, plus one day prior to and following Valentine’s Day. This is where the power of cloud computing kicks in. In one stroke I have reduced my cost to a fraction of what I would pay with a traditional setup.
No cost for setup and maintenance
You just can’t ignore the cost of setting up web servers. To add 100 servers you need two dedicated engineers. You have to worry about load balancing, setting up round robin DNS, and assigning IPs to individual servers. Getting clean IPs, or ones which have not been blacklisted, can be a huge headache. In a cloud service you don’t have to worry about any of these things. You save on salaries for dedicated engineers, which can be a tidy sum.
Managing server overload
Even after taking all these precautions you may face an isolated server overload. I have seen it happen. Auto-failover is certainly a feature which can save you from embarrassment. Sudden disruption of service due to server downtime does affect your reputation, especially when you have competitors who are waiting to cash in on poor quality of service.
GMO Cloud simplifies this process by implementing a high availability solution ensuring constant uptime. Read more about the reliability of this solution on the High Availability page.
Put a ribbon on it
Valentine’s is a big day for technologists. I certainly wish you and your loved ones all the best on this special day.
And as for the data that you care about so much — may it rest in a cloud of happiness!
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About the Guest Author:
Sankarambadi Srinivasan (or ‘Srini’) is a maverick writer, technopreneur, geek and online marketing enthusiast rolled into one. He began his career as a naval weapon specialist. Later he sold his maiden venture and became head of an offshore Database administration company in Mumbai. He moved on as Chief Technology Officer of one of the largest online entities, where he led consolidation of 300 online servers and introduced several Web 2.0 initiatives. He holds a Master’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication.
