Why websites buckled under consumer pressure

The sites either crashed due to the infrastructure they are built on or because the servers could not process a large number of requests being sent. With online shopping becoming more prominent in South Africa, businesses cannot afford not to look ahead and invest in the latest scalable and dynamic technologies.

As of 8am on the morning of Black Friday, CTM, which is one of our clients that uses Azure, had processed about R330,000 worth of orders. The site was adjusting to the needs of consumers.

Azure’s ability for elastic infrastructure is a game changer for digital campaigns and e-commerce from an IT perspective.

With server-based websites, the infrastructure is scaled to cater for a projected worst-case scenario. This is time-consuming and could still not be sufficient – not to mention the high costs involved. Infrastructure cannot be scaled resulting in the campaign website crashing. This is evidenced by the unreliability of websites during campaigns such as Black Friday.

With elasticity, sites automatically scale to manage the increased traffic based on triggers such as CPU (central processing unit) or memory usage. In turn, the scaling of the sites allows the load to be balanced across multiple instances of the site, ensuring no downtime and no degradation of service due to load on the server.