May the Cloud Force be with you. What the recent movie tickets services crash teaches us.

Have you heard how frustrating was ordering tickets for the next Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Big online services like Fandango, MovieTickets, AMC, Regal, Cinemark and others across the globe were crashing when the fans flooded them in attempts to book the tickets just after the announcement.

“Cloud Force” could really help here. As this was a significant peak in booking service consumption, this could be addressed perfectly by the the cloud:

• Rapid elasticity would allow to handle a sharply increased number of consumers without noticeable degradation of the service level. The computational nodes could be added automatically and transparently and deprovisioned when not needed any more.
• Hybrid cloud scenario would allow to borrow the required computational power from the public cloud without any need in investing in dedicated infrastructure.

Even if this peak would be unexpected, the cloud could handle it based on the utilization metrics; however in this case the spike was perfectly foreseen so the anticipated load could be addressed with schedule-based elasticity triggers or even with manual provisioning.

The automatic elasticity comes extremely smooth if you deal with the cloud on the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) level, everything will be handled for you mostly transparently. If you want to keep the resources under control on IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) level, for some of the most popular public cloud providers those features that enable automatic elasticity would be:

• Amazon Web Services: Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling Group
• Microsoft Azure: Cloud Services, Azure Load Balancer

Basically, the cloud wouldn't only help to handle such peaks in usage and thrive, it would also make it happen in really cost-effective way, without any requirement of statically assigned mostly idling infrastructure.

This is the news coverage:

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/star-wars-online-ticket-sales/
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/19/star-wars-ticket-demand-crashes-uk-cinema-websites.html
http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/19/media/star-wars-movie-tickets/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2015/10/20/star-wars-presales-crash-ticketing-sites-sets-record-for-fandango/

Those are apologies from some of the services:

https://twitter.com/ritzycinema/status/656385731687030785
https://twitter.com/ODEONCinemas/status/656041802013810688