SOASTA Session at Cloud Expo

Dan Bartow, Vice President and Cloud Evangelist for SOASTA, will be speaking to the spiky nature of website traffic during his Cloud Expo presentation on Monday, April 19 (4:40pm-5:25pm) at the Javits Center in New York.

Writing about his session, he notes, "when social media are done well and the users from numerous sources converge on a site, there's an inevitable spike in traffic, often supercharged by leveraging social media."

"For example, Denny's promotion during the Super Bowl increased traffic to their site 1700%. Companies are becoming increasingly proficient at cross-platform marketing. In particular, using social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, in conjunction with traditional media, is driving new levels of  traffic to websites."

The spikes present "great opportunities for recipients of the traffic, if they can handle it," he writes. "The elasticity of the Cloud is one of the most effective ways to handle these dramatic swings."

This is not a simple technical problem, however, he says. "Simply throwing more servers at a problem is rarely the solution, and the same is true of scaling in the Cloud."

In his session, he promises that attendees will learn how to make architectural decisions for their online applications that set the stage for performance and scalability when deploying in the Cloud to handle unforeseen spikes. "We'll cover everything from the underlying technology choices, such as the use of Flash vs. HTML5, the infrastructure and typical breaking points to the ongoing operations of measuring performance," he says.