Head in the Clouds

Looking back at 2008, we made some huge changes on the technical side of our websites. The biggest change was the move to Cloud Computing. There are different types of cloud computing offered by various companies so I will only speak to Amazon's Web Services.

Our biggest challenge each year is to gear up for the month of May. Each year traffic increases 200% - 300%. Leasing hardware for one month is very expensive. The other issue we had was finding the right amount of hardware to handle the Indy Racing League events. ISP's and CDN's had partial solutions but nobody had the right combination to handle bursts of traffic for short durations of time during live events.

The complete solution for live events turned out to be Cloud Computing. Specifically, EC2 instances running Linux/Unix. Cloud allowed us to do 3 critical components for us. 1. Scalability, 2. Reliability 3. Massive Storage.

1. Scalability -- EC2 is broken down into instances ranging from small instances to xtra large instances. These instances are based on different configurations of memory, CPU and storage. These instances are rented by the hour which makes it very cost effective for our live events.

Scalability is nice but it is even more important to quickly scale up during events. A moving variable for us is not knowing how many users will watch events live. TV not showing an event causes a large increase in online viewer ship although that has leveled off with the adaptation of broadband over the past few years.

Our ingenious staff has been able to replicate and deploy these instances within 15 minutes. Down from 24 hours back in April. We monitor traffic levels during the events so we know when to start up new instances when we hit certain levels of traffic. This flexibility has allowed us to go to the next level of entertainment for our fans.

The EC2's have been used for our websites, Live T&S and Live video streaming.

2. Reliability -- CDN's do a great job handling large amounts of traffic. The biggest drawback is you have to estimate how much traffic you will have each year. This is difficult to do and if you underestimate then you are basically penalized by paying more for each Gig thereafter.

What Cloud Computing offers is basically an all in one package. You get the benefits of and ISP combined with a CDN. (Note: You don't get all the benefits you would normally get with a CDN). I am not sure what CDN Amazon uses or even if they use one. The bottom line is the experience didn't change enough to require a CDN.

Amazon's infrastructure has been reliable given the importance of delivering live data on a large scale.

3. Massive Storage -- A service called S3. S3 can be used as a stand alone service or tied into the EC2 services. We use it for both. S3 has been great for a backup large scale storage solution. Hopefully by the end of 2009, the entire Indianapolis Motor Speedway image library will be on the S3 service.

This is just a very brief overview of a technical shift we embraced for 2008 and have grown it throughout the year. The 2009 season will see a number of enhancements and new developments based on cloud computing that we could have never done before.