Cloud Optimization & the FIFA World Cup

The success of the World Cup relies on the cloud. I’m aware this may seem like a bold statement, it’s a soccer (or football) tournament after all. Success should hinge on the outcome and entertainment value of the actual games. But, to even extract any entertainment from the tournament people have to be able to watch and go to the games in the first place. This massive, globally embraced sporting event is almost the perfect example of what well managed cloud infrastructure can offer.

The Cup Creates Instant Cloud Demand

As a recent article by Larry Larmeu on CIO points out, the World Cup creates enormous demand for a few cloud-based services. Streaming and ticket purchasing in particular see large and erratic spikes in traffic. The services that make it possible for the majority of spectators to view the games have to be operating at peak performance to handle this volume. A single high profile game can drive thousands of people to a certain site or application within a window of time as small as 30 seconds. The ability to deliver video content and tickets to millions of people isn’t magic. It’s the result of an incredibly complicated infrastructure of computing. Moving workloads to the cloud is a great start, cloud provides greater computing elasticity compared to on-premises solutions. The ticketing service Entradas moved their workloads onto Amazon Web Services for this World Cup. However, cost and management of those resources is still an important piece of the puzzle. Operational efficiency and cost effectiveness can both be improved by dynamic cloud management.

The Importance of Right Sizing

Densify allows companies to embrace a dynamic cloud solution and create self-optimizing applications. These applications leverage machine-learned utilization models to match themselves with the optimal instance types. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to the public cloud. When your applications are handling the volume of traffic a company like Entradas would during the World Cup, incorrectly sized instances can lead to a seriously degraded performance.

Application Automation is the Future

The same principle holds true for more than just sporting events. Many enterprises deal with seasonal or periodical spikes of workload demand. Dealing with this traffic requires extensive analysis, reporting, and processing. The true beauty of pairing the public cloud with self-optimizing applications is in reducing this amount of work. If your applications are fully aware of their own instance needs and efficiently matched with the right cloud resources, manual effort can be expended elsewhere. Furthermore, it eliminates the mistake of over-provisioning to deal with greater traffic volume. It is essential that these companies have reliable and dynamic cloud management to deal with the workload in an efficient manner.

If the World Cup is any indication, public cloud resources are aptly fit to handle the demand of modern day streaming and online sales. Moving to the cloud offers greater infrastructure flexibility and supposed less cost when compared to on-premises solutions. However, the growing nature of cloud offerings means there are changes almost every day. Furthermore, there are millions of permutations to procure one instance, making it extremely difficult to rely on manual efforts. This trend is unlikely to stop, and machine-learning-enabled cloud automation will soon be all but necessary.