The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Another reason to finish moving to Azure

As I've noted before, only one Web application still lives in my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center: Weather Now. In the last few days, it's showing one more good reason that it needs to get to Windows Azure pronto.

Take a look at my Google Analytics view of incoming visitors:

What is going on? How do I go from 300 daily unique visitors to 1,800 in two days? Take a look at where they're coming from:

Yes, that's right. Close to 40% of Weather Now's traffic came from the Yukon Territory yesterday. And another 40% came from Alaska. And they're all going to this page for some reason. This might be why:

So how does Azure enter into it? Simply, if you have a Web application running on your own server, and you get a 750% increase in traffic, your server may not be able to handle it. Or, worse in a way, you might have been running the server capable of handling the peak load all the time, at great expense in electricity and hardware.

With Azure, you can simply bring another instance online, or increase the size of your running instance, or do any number of things to adapt quickly to the increased load, without having to buy or move the hardware. Then, when the load returns to normal, you can spin down the idle capacity. The trick is, you only pay for the capacity you're actually using.

I'm getting a lot closer to moving Weather Now, but a deadline looming at my paying job tomorrow has my attention at the moment. So more on this stuff later. Meanwhile, if you're in the Yukon or in central Alaska, stay warm, folks!

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