Page 47 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE AMORPHOUS CL OUD

could not buy because traffic overwhelmed what was already
“a very database intensive” site.
Other surges were felt around the Internet. The Twitter
broadcasting site was overwhelmed by users’ tweets and
slowed to a standstill. TicketMaster in London slowed to a
crawl. Yahoo! was staggered by 16.4 million site visitors in the

24 hours, compared to a previous peak of 15.1 million on
Election Day.
“Our site became the water cooler for everyone wanting
to remember Michael Jackson,” Taylor recalled in an inter-
view four months later.
Sony Music’s top management told Taylor that it was not
acceptable to have traffic trying to reach a company music

site and have would-be customers left hanging, with no re-
sponse from an overwhelmed site. With 200 individual artists’
e-commerce sites engaged in capturing both transactions and
user feedback, Taylor had a large problem that couldn’t be
solved in the conventional way: buy a lot more servers, more
network bandwidth, and more storage, and throw them at the
problem. If he had followed this route, most of that expensive
equipment would have sat unused in Sony’s own corporate
data center. What’s a senior system engineer to do?

Taylor has since rearchitected the Michael Jackson store,
AC/DC’s online store, and other popular artists’ sites so that
traffic can be split into two streams when necessary: those who
are buying music (conducting transactions) and those who are
just seeking information. The transactions remain on the core
store site hosted on Sony’s dedicated servers, but visitors who are
seeking read-only content, such as background on an artist and

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