Why you need elastic applications
12 October 2016 · Filed in InfrastructureAhead of Tuesday's £150M+ Lottery draw, an email was sent to thousands of users of the UK National Lottery website.
"This is a service message to let you know that we expect to see high volumes of visitors to The National Lottery website and app in the hours leading up to the close of ticket sales for the EuroMillions draw, at 7.30pm, on Tuesday 11th October.
If you plan to buy a ticket for any of our games this week and you need to add funds to your account to play, we would recommend that you do this as early as possible in order to avoid disappointment. "
We suspect that something in the infrastructure doesn't scale automatically. No doubt the web or front end servers scale, however they are expecting a performance bottle neck somewhere. This is where performance testing of the whole infrastructure is important, to identify and work on those bottle necks. Once identified, automation of the service can be planned and provided. Often it is the database layer, but these too can be scaled with read replicas or sharded, allowing for greater number of active connections.
For more information or a quick chat, contact us.
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