The OpenWater Blog

Scale Traffic and Grow Your Program With OpenWater

Downtime and outages can be crippling for awards programs, especially during the final days of the entry period. This compels many of our customers to come to us with one burning question they can’t put to rest: “How can I be sure you can handle the workload we require?”

To be fair, downtime is and should be a major concern for any organization. It can impact your program in unpredictable ways.

At OpenWater, our professional partnerships, proactive approach, and response to previous demands support our ability to scale traffic for any organization.

An Infrastructure Built to Scale

What do Twitter, Netflix, and Dropbox have in common? All three, at one time or another, were supported by Amazon web services for massive data transmittal purposes. OpenWater is also supported by Amazon web services, granting us the bandwidth to support thousands of programs.

Our infrastructure was built with scalability in mind. For example, all files uploaded to our website never touch our infrastructure. Instead, they go directly from the person uploading them to cloud storage. Our servers are only involved to grant security access to the data upon transmission.

All web traffic on the website is also distributed over what is referred to as a “load balancer.” Load balancers ensure that each of our servers,each normally function at only 20% capacity so none are overwhelmed by website activity and crash unexpectedly. As traffic surges we can automatically add more servers to keep the system running smoothly.

Addressing Outages and Downtime

No website has 100% uptime. At OpenWater, we’re transparent about outages and downtime and, after each issue in the past, have proactively built a more stable platform to prevent similar problems in the future. You can see our independently tracked uptime monitor here. We are our proud of our 99.99%+ uptime!

Here are just some of the mechanisms in place to prevent common problems:

• Offloading Long Running Tasks – Long running tasks, like reports, get routed to a different set of servers for processing. We simply queue up reporting requests so that we can ensure fast throughput of the most important activities, like awards submissions and judge score recording.
• Automatic Addition of Servers, when the primary servers go above 20% capacity OR the long running tasks take more than a minute to start processing, we add more servers.
• Equal Server Distribution, effectively preventing one server from being overloaded and crashing at any time. There’s also a queue system in place to prevent potential overloads.

What Happens When “Inclement Weather” Strikes

Problems can and sometimes do occur with our infrastructure and those we depend on to remain operational. Unfortunately, this means it is out of our control. At the same time, we don’t accept this as an excuse to not remain proactive in finding resolutions to problems.

We have a public status page where we transparently share any information about outages. You can see from the history that in the course of an entire year we have 1 or fewer incidents. In the event something does occur though, we are quick to report it and are staffed to share insights from our engineering team as a resolution is worked out.

Most incidents are avoided because we have a “fast failover” system that allows us to switch data centers within 5 minutes. This means we can isolate our customers from feeling the pain of infrastructure issues.

So, Can OpenWater Scale? Yes, We Can.

Scalability is a common concern for any organization. Year over year, it’s your prerogative to increase the number of quality entries received and to secure an enjoyable, reliable platform from which to run your program.

With support from Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace, no OpenWater issue is managed alone. Likewise, our proactive approach and experience in scaling our platform over the last few years has led to a robust system that is prepared to address hundreds or thousands of entries from your program.

So yes, we can scale. Won’t you join us?

Kunal Johar

Kunal Johar is the OpenWater platform evangelist. He currently manages our development teams and enjoys diving into the fray. Find him in our community chat room.

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