When Apple product announcements occur, consumers of the world pay rapt attention and one of the premier technology sites they rely upon for live event updates is Engadget.
The Engadget infrastructure must seamlessly sustain incredible traffic spikes during these Apple events. How do we get there?
Keep it simple: LAMP
Cache, cache, cache: CDN, load balancer, memcache
Manage the complexities: Sometimes you don’t want GSLB to automatically failover
Make no assumptions: Validate, re-validate, and then do it some more
Work well with others: Respect, trust, and communication are key
Valerie Detweiler has worked in tech support and operations for over 17 years. Today Valerie is an SRE at AOL wrangling all things layer 3–7 and especially layer 8. Valerie was a Technical Support Engineer for Netscape and Inktomi before landing at AOL in 2002.
Chris Stolfi has been with AOL Technical Operations since 2000 and is currently a Principal Systems Administrator on AOL's Published Content Systems (www.engadget.com, www.moviefone.com, www.autoblog.com, etc.).
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BibTeX
@conference {255709,
author = {Valerie Detweiler and Chris Stolfi},
title = {Surviving The Thundering Hordes: Keeping Engadget Alive During Apple Product Announcements},
year = {2012},
address = {San Diego, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}
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