ePetitions (07/08/11 13:38)
So I see that the (UK) Government has launched it's ePetitions portal this week. My first thought on hearing about this was 'but don't we already have one of those'? It turns out that the original Government petitions site was closed shortly before the last general election so more money had been spent on developing a new site, the added 'advantage' this time is that if a petition receives enough signatures it might be tabled for discussion in Parliament. Ignoring the political/financial implications for the moment, let's talk about what happened when the site was launched...it crashed due to the 'overwhelming' number of people trying to visit the site. Overwhelming? Really? Well yes it was overwhelming in the sense that the site was overwhelmed, but why was that level of traffic not expected? Remember when the Police.uk site was launched earlier in the year, it crashed due again to the level of traffic trying to access it. We might expect that traffic will rapidly fall as the novelty wears off so in order to save costs in the long run we don't want a huge infrastructure in place to begin with. But hang on a minute, isn't there some technology that can cope with dynamic infrastructure scaling? Why yes there is, cloud computing gives us the power to scale up and down rapidly, so we can cope with the massive traffic influx in the beginning and then lower running costs as traffic falls. I really do find it difficult to believe that we aren't making better use of the technologies we have available.
Originally posted on Blogger.com