How many times we have seen web servers crash because of high traffic? From the big billion sale on Flipkart to the freedom 251 website crash to the periodic outages at IRCTC, I’ve lost count.
Hardware has always and will continue fail or break apart, usually when we are least prepared for it. You can use the fanciest of infrastructure- AWS, Softlayer, Azure to name a few, but you have to realize that you are responsible for making your solution resilient (keep in mind I have not used the word fault tolerant, that would be discussed another day).
One of our clients was recently featured on Shark Tank. Along with developing the sophisticated IOT app that was shown on the show, we were also responsible for creating and maintaining the website. The challenge was how to scale for more than 1 million users, that too in a matter of a few minutes.
On getting a heads up from our client we went ahead with designing and putting our architecture to the test via tools like loader.io. After multiple tests and a few failures we finally got a resilient solution. We tested against millions of simultaneous requests just to be completely sure of everything. D-day came and our machines stuck through with a 100% response rate and record sales!