As news spread of Michael Jackson’s death, the internet also went into cardiac arrest. News reports came in that show that spikes in just about every type of online traffic pushed the Web to its limits — from text messaging to news sites to celebrity gossip sites and more. The latest is that the pop star’s death is even yielding new malware and spam. Venturebeat is calling the whole debacle a “wake-up call for the web, and for those who are building its infrastructure and plumbing for it.”
In short, this unexpected moment of shared mourning has revealed weaknesses in the network at many levels.
As Chris Preimesberger points out in a recent eWeek post, we must also deal with the short- and long-term storage consequences of a massive number of photos and YouTube videos of Jackson being posted in the wake of his death. Writes Preimesberger:
“While all the surge talk has been about Web servers going nuts, not much has been written about the storage that has to handle all these new documents, most of which will be kept forever somewhere. We’re not just talking about all the billions of text messages, e-mails, Facebook and Twitter messages, and the like. How about all the photos and YouTube videos of Jacko, plus all the affiliated videos being posted that he’s not even in?”
There’s truth to this: I even caught myself passing around a few videos, and to be frank, I’m not much of a fan.
Data Center Knowledge offers a graphical representation of the slowing of news sites during the course of the cycle (thanks @skenniston for link). In a post entitled “The Web Creaks as Jackson Fans Mourn” it shows that the availability of news sites dropped dramatically as the news leaked out of Jackson’s demise. Some have said this is a perfect argument for a more cohesive cloud computing strategy.
The post cites Reuven Cohen at Elastic Vapor, who writes: “There is no longer any good reason for a professional website property to go down because of load … Cloud computing provides an almost infinite supply of computing capacity, be it a infrastructure as a service or platform as a service or even a traditional CDN. Not have a cloud bursting strategy in the age of cloud computing isn’t just wrong – it’s idiotic.”
In light of this experience, is it time to take stock?
I will surely miss Michael Jackson, he is really worthy of the name King of Pop and he is certainly one of the greatest musicians of all time…