Summer Camp

The other week I had a conversation with my good friend Jim who runs the IT operations for a summer camp. As you might guess, most of the year the camp’s website gets a fairly predictable amount of traffic. Nothing special is required.

Except for the day summer camp registration opens.

At 8:00 am a massive spike happens. Hundreds of summer camp spots are filled in less than 10 minutes. The most popular camp weeks are filled in 3 minutes with a waitlist of dozens quickly forming. By the end of the day half the camp weeks are full, and by the end of the week registration is pretty much at capacity (with long wait lists).

How does Jim manage this kind of spike in traffic? The design that covered 99% of the year will fail him at the most crucial moment for the organization.

This is one of the simplest arguments for moving to the cloud.

Because a few days before registration day, my friend Jim goes into Azure and scales up the web servers to 7 times their normal size.

In many situations a 99% solution is great. But without understanding the business properly, a 99% solution could be catastrophic.

I’m here,

Sawyer