Taylor Swift + the Cloud = Bigger than the whole sky

Apologies for the delay in getting this month’s newsletter out; it’s been a Cruel Summer, I mean Winter. The last time we were this caught up with superstars was when Lady Gaga decided to pose for a photo next to our front door.

It’s been a crazy end of financial year for us, and the release of Taylor Swift tickets required much attention. Anyone with teenage daughters can attest to this. We’ve been telling them all week not to get too excited, “You need to calm down.”

I am sure most people have had the following up on their screen while working this week. But don’t blame me if you can’t get them. Indeed these are regarded as Champagne problems.

Sitting here, watching the screen refresh every 10 seconds, my mind goes to the planning, resourcing and execution required to ensure the crush of attempts to buy tickets doesn’t bring the site down.

At any one time, I am sure million-plus requests are coming through for 200,000 tickets. The site has to remain up and funnel the next in line to get through and let them complete a purchase. You could call it the End game.

This requires the ability to scale up when a major event comes to town, but you only want to pay for this kind of service some of the year. It would be costly; some even say a Gold Rush for cloud providers.

Cloud services allows this kind of scalability. You can request extra resources for a short time to deal with an immediate need, and then scale back down when that need passes.

Our team do this all the time. For example, suppose our developers need access to a database, That’s When they run an automated process that will make a call to our Cloud provider, spin up the database, allow it to be used, and decommission it again. We say Bye Bye Baby, until next time.

I remember as recently as 2007 when I was trying to buy Preliminary finals tickets for my beloved Hawks. Back then, the cloud wasn’t a thing, and all the ticketing servers just crashed. There was no scaling up or down, well, not like we can now. I just had to Shake It Off, and keep pressing refresh. For those of you with onsite servers, now is an excellent moment to move with the times, move to the cloud and have a Blank Space where that server used to be.