Whether you run a Content Delivery Network or you have your own centralized content platform and are a CDN customer, there is not much you can do besides over building your infrastructure to protect yourself and your audience against flash crowds or unexpected news events. In the even of such traffic surges, not only are you unable to you serve all of your potential audience, this also spoils the experience of your existing user base because of the resource bottleneck.
We all remember the audience and bandwidth records set in the Internet’s history that were bound to President Obama’s inaugural speech and Michael Jackson’s memorial concert. The fact is that no one can afford to size one’s network according to such historical audiences, as it doesn’t generally make business sense.
Nevertheless, these moments are truly those in which your audience will rely on you.
3Crowd offers you (as a CDN or a CDN customer) a simple, efficient and riskless solution to these issues. The CrowdDirector and CrowdCache product suite allow you to complement your mix of existing Content Delivery, centralized infrastructure with a sizeable crowd of CrowdCache nodes.
All you need to do is spin a few cloud instances billed-by-the-hour over your chosen provider, push the CrowdCache software on these, and bind them with your existing traffic mix through the CrowdDirector Load-balancing service. Once things get quiet after the storm, you can cancel these extra resources and remove the rules from the CrowdDirector.
Congratulations! You have kept your audience satisfied at a moderate cost, without having to re-think your delivery architecture at the last minute.