Venice the series is a web soap opera series and the creative concept of long time friends and artistic partners Crystal Chappell and Kimmy Turrisi.

The situation

The first launch of the site failed as the site was hosted on a single server unable to handle the visits from a large number of fans that the movie gain even before airing the first episode. Being the fact that the peak usage was during the next 8-10 hours after the new episodes airing, a solution was required to handle the high spikes of traffic and to provide load balancing and high availability.

The solution

The solution came as a deployment on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the customer has chosen to use a 3rd party management solution provided by RightScale.

The deployment setup is being described on RightScale Support page. Two front end servers using Amazon Elastic IPs distribute the HTTP/HTTPS queries to themselves as well as to an auto scalable array of EC2 instances. The array auto scaling criteria is represented by the CPU idle value of the existing members of the array and of the front end servers and the decision of scaling up or down the array is vote based, meaning that all members have to agree with a scale up or down decision before the array is being actually changed. This ensure that the scaling is based on real values and not on some momentary out of the range values that one member may provide.  Besides the auto scaling solution based on the CPU usage a scaling is being done through the array schedule feature provided by RightScale, increasing the array members just before the known events meant to attract a lot of users (like airing new episodes of the movie).

Now the site can handle a very large number of users and the movie reached the 4th episode of  the first season.

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