Keeping Your Website Up During High-Traffic Events
With COVID-19 updates coming in real-time, government and healthcare websites are experiencing unprecedented traffic. Many of these sites weren’t built to handle such spikes.
Michael Salisbury, Director of DevOps at Kentech-U, notes:
“You’d be surprised how many websites and applications want to grow but haven’t considered the infrastructure needed to support that growth.”
To help, here are a few best DevOps practices for keeping your site online while saving money:
1. Site and Application Monitoring
Robust monitoring is the first step. It provides insights into your application’s performance and health, allowing your team to detect anomalies and anticipate traffic surges. Alerts from monitoring tools let you prepare resources before site performance suffers, avoiding downtime.
2. Micro-Services Architecture
Separate your website’s components across different services or servers. For example:
- Front End: one stack/service
- Back End/CMS: another stack/service
This approach reduces risk. If one component fails, it won’t bring down the entire site. Micro-services also allow teams to make updates behind the scenes without downtime — essential for scaling your product or service.
3. Auto-Scaling
Auto-scaling automatically adds or removes resources based on predetermined metrics such as CPU usage or traffic volume.
For instance, if a sudden spike in visitors occurs, auto-scaling deploys additional servers to handle the load. Once traffic decreases, the system scales down automatically. This ensures reliability while keeping costs in check.
By implementing monitoring, micro-services, and auto-scaling, your site can handle high traffic seamlessly, maintain zero downtime, and remain cost-effective.
Need help scaling your website or application? Schedule a complimentary consultation with our DevOps strategists and engineers.