The Power of Simple, Predictable Scalability with Caspio

Over the weekend we had a spike in activity from one of our customer apps. This app was generating ten times the usual traffic, and we were curious as to what was causing the spike in form submissions on their site. Turns out, the account in question was WGRZ, an NBC affiliate in the Buffalo, NY region. Their web site was running a contest for local schools, wherein the WGRZ weather personality would make an appearance which includes some cool interactive presentations with his “weather machine.”

This weekend was the deadline for entries to have “Andy’s Weather Machine,” make an appearance. Apparently, demand for Andy’s machine was high, since we saw literally thousands and thousands of form submissions submitted over the course of about four hours, with the 10x spike appearing just one hour before the contest closed.

On the one hand, we are thrilled that students and their families are excited about a fun, educational promotion from WGRZ. But what is more exciting for us is just how smoothly this spike in traffic was handled.

Think about it. Years ago, had a company been managing their application themselves, such a fast spike could have brought down entire systems not expecting such a huge uptick in user activity. Even if a spike is expected, not properly planning for the extremity of the spike could leave a server vulnerable to crashes. And, even in early “hosted” application models, there did not exist the elasticity of the modern cloud to smoothly handle spikes. With only a few minutes (or even seconds) to prepare, many older web application models would simply fail to respond in time to such a huge and rapid increase in activity. An unexpected spike in activity like this could have brought down an entire web site in the recent past, and for many organizations still maintaining their own web applications via traditional models.

This chart shows the rapid spike in user traffic inside this Caspio account, handled without issue or interruption.

Today, businesses of all sizes have two advantages over older application models. For one, they do not have to spend large amounts of time and resources building apps: simple, cloud-based platforms like Caspio which do not require coding exist to speed time to deploy apps. Second, since Caspio manages the entire application life cycle and delivery – these users do not need to worry about traffic spikes or other scalability concerns. We have you covered.

The beauty of the Caspio cloud is that companies need not build any infrastructure themselves when bringing new applications and systems into operation. Just as we assume our electricity will  remain intact even if we turn on every light, TV, and appliance in our homes – the Caspio cloud offers predictable and reliable scalability. And with Caspio, you do not pay additional fees for the compute power underneath your apps. The scalability and reliability are built right in.