As much as seasonal increases in demand for on-line resources are discussed, the one day that’s often overlooked is April Fools Day.
It’s the day the Internet loses its mind and your best bet is take everything not just with a grain of salt, but with the entire shaker.
The use of April Fools’ Day to promote brand awareness and bring some laughter into the world as everyone tries to outdo everyone else in a bid to be named the King of Fools is well known. This is no more a surprise today than is Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Super Bowl Sunday.
So it behooves those participating in the tom foolery to be prepared. That means being ready to handle an increased demand for whatever it is you’re offering up for consumption. This is where devops shines; where automation and orchestration and a demand-driven scalability strategy is your best answer. Because you can’t be sure your offering is going to go viral, but you can be sure it won’t if any piece of the application delivery chain breaks under the pressure.
In other words, this is unacceptable:
What might have gone viral may end up languishing as just another overlooked and forgotten attempt because of a lack of database resources and a failed scaling strategy.
One of the key aspects of devops is that it should approach scalability with a comprehensive view of how each piece of the delivery chain needs to scale – and when. Thresholds and metrics collected from each domain of an application architecture must be correlated and understood in the context of how it impacts capacity so that it can be automatically scaled – or at least addressed – on demand.
Maybe that means devops must advise a cloud-based approach to handling demand for such days. Maybe that means a bit more preparation and integration across the entire application delivery chain to ensure the load balancing service is basing its decisions on the right variables such that resources are maximized and enable greater scale across the application. Maybe that means throwing up a cache to reduce the pressure on web and application servers, or taking advantage of a CDN.
Regardless of the approach to how you’re going to scale, devops practitioners should be driving the process to ensure that on April Fools Day – or any well-known high demand generation day – the joke is not on them.