Page 52 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

in traffic when some small event, such as the pouring of the
foundation, triggered a response among the event’s expand-
ing audience.
Asked what traffic to expect, Conrad Ricketts, Extreme
Makeover’s executive producer, advised Parker that each site
built for the show so far that year had crashed as successive

waves of traffic washed over it. “I was told, ‘You will need to
make sure you have an unlimited supply of beer and pizza for
your network administrator,’” recalled Parker when he was in-
terviewed by InformationWeek four days after the Philo episode
aired. It would be the network administrator’s job to reboot
the site after each crash. The prediction was that the network
administrator would need to be at his post for long periods at

a time.
Parker concluded that if he attempted to host the show on
his existing servers, the traffic would crash the 200 Web sites
of his other existing clients, a prospect that he did not relish.
He opted to place the Extreme Makeover site in the Rackspace
Cloud, a service that guaranteed as much hardware, network-
ing, and storage as the customer needed, no matter how dras-
tically its workload changed.
Contrary to what Parker expected, big waves of traffic hit

the site prior to the show’s October 25, 2009, airing. Parker says
he knows that he would not have been ready for those spikes
on his own. The newspapers in Bloomington and Champaign
wrote stories about the home repair project and the family
that would benefit, setting off waves of inquisitive visitors.
A follower of the event put up a fan page on Facebook that
overnight gained 12,600 fans, most of whom seemed to want

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