"When we added servers we got instability problems on our
website"
Our customer's e-business was expanding rapidly. The annual
growth rate was at 100 percent. So far they had increased their
capacity by adding more servers to their clusters but now they had
reached a scalability bottleneck and during peak load they had
instability issues and serious failures. Needless to say this
was very costly and since we had provided them with expert
solutions before they came to us for help. What they asked for was
something that would secure their next three years of expansion. In
practice this meant that their system must cope with loads that
were ten times than their current peak loads.
Our Proof of Concept study secured the expansion for the next
five years
Since we had already established a good cooperation with our
customer's internet department we could pick up where we had left
and work together. In a project of this magnitude, it's important
to be thorough and make the right decisions from the start. Our
first step was to conduct a pre-study which gave us a recommended
set of actions and extensions. After that we conducted a full-scale
Proof of Concept study with two vendors. We evaluated the results
and commenced negotiations with the winning vendor. When we had
reached an agreement we implemented the solution in four delivery
increments. What we did included a serious architectural
re-factoring of the e-shop. And as a side effect of this project we
established a vastly improved stage environment with automated
scalability testing. Eventually the project was a major
success that gained a reputation within the industry because of its
flawless delivery despite the huge risks involved with the project.
Our work also helped other projects with how to conduct and analyse
scalability tests. Without the instability issues and a solution
that would last over time the owner of the business was very
pleased:
"We haven't had any problems in production since project X
delivered their first increments of the solution. Very
impressive."