The Weather Channel weathered its own storm of sorts when it experienced its highest traffic ever over the course of Hurricane Sandy.
The media company typically supports about 90 million Web and mobile users a month. During Sandy, that figure jumped to 450 million, nearly double its previous high for Web traffic.
Fortunately, The Weather Channel was prepared for the traffic surge, according to an article on NetworkWorld.com.
The company’s IT team had recently architected its real-time radar mapping. On typical days, the mapping system runs on about 20 instances, but during Sandy it scaled up to run on 175 nodes.
It’s a classic use-case for the cloud: Variable and unpredictable peak demand for Web services is outsourced to a public cloud provider. It would have required a major investment to spin up a system across the company’s on-premise and colocation environments to support the traffic load it experienced when Sandy ripped up the Eastern Seaboard, and then it would have likely gone mostly unused during other times. The alternative would have been not to have the compute horsepower to serve all the visitors to The Weather Channel’s platforms.