packrat
20th Jun 2011, 02:21
Sunday June 19th, 2011 By Ian GRAYSON (http://www.hydrapinion.com/index.php/work/?disp=user&user_ID=12)
Having spent much of the past week as a victim of the volcanic ash cloud, I've got one thing to say to Qantas about it: get into the clouds.
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And by that I'm not talking about getting your planes into the air (although that's what rival Virgin Australia managed to do) No, I'm talking about making use of cloud computing to ensure your web site remains usable during times of unexpected demand - because it most certainly wasn't last week.
When ash clouds brought flights to and from Melbourne, Tasmania and New Zealand to an abrupt halt last Monday, the travel plans of tens of thousands of people were thrown into disarray. Naturally they were keen to find out what was happening and many went online to do it.
As a Qantas passenger, I headed to [URL="http://www.qantas.com/"]Qantas.com (http://www.hydrapinion.com/media/blogs/work/a380-engine.jpg) to try to figure out when I might be able to get home. Evidently I wasn't alone and the site's performance dropped through the floor.
Pages would not load or, if they did, displayed little of value. Re-booking or checking the status of flights became almost impossible as the extent of the delays increased and more people joined the online rush for information.
Now, I acknowledge that demands on the site were unexpected, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be able to cope. Major disruptions to airlines schedules are not a "never happens" kind of thing.
So why, like so many other companies, does Qantas not have the ability to rapidly scale its web site capacity at times of increased demand?
Such scaling is not as difficult as it used to be. Thanks to the rise of cloud computing, there are a number of providers that can provide on-demand capacity for customers during their hour of need.
Rather than having server racks installed but sitting idle just in case they might one day be needed, companies can rent extra capacity in the cloud and bring it online instantly.
So, as demands on the Qantas website spiked, capacity could have been scaled to ensure user access was maintained. The result? Much happier customers.
As well as getting its jets back into the clouds, it could be time for Qantas to take the same approach to the the data centre running its website.
Having spent much of the past week as a victim of the volcanic ash cloud, I've got one thing to say to Qantas about it: get into the clouds.
[/URL]
And by that I'm not talking about getting your planes into the air (although that's what rival Virgin Australia managed to do) No, I'm talking about making use of cloud computing to ensure your web site remains usable during times of unexpected demand - because it most certainly wasn't last week.
When ash clouds brought flights to and from Melbourne, Tasmania and New Zealand to an abrupt halt last Monday, the travel plans of tens of thousands of people were thrown into disarray. Naturally they were keen to find out what was happening and many went online to do it.
As a Qantas passenger, I headed to [URL="http://www.qantas.com/"]Qantas.com (http://www.hydrapinion.com/media/blogs/work/a380-engine.jpg) to try to figure out when I might be able to get home. Evidently I wasn't alone and the site's performance dropped through the floor.
Pages would not load or, if they did, displayed little of value. Re-booking or checking the status of flights became almost impossible as the extent of the delays increased and more people joined the online rush for information.
Now, I acknowledge that demands on the site were unexpected, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be able to cope. Major disruptions to airlines schedules are not a "never happens" kind of thing.
So why, like so many other companies, does Qantas not have the ability to rapidly scale its web site capacity at times of increased demand?
Such scaling is not as difficult as it used to be. Thanks to the rise of cloud computing, there are a number of providers that can provide on-demand capacity for customers during their hour of need.
Rather than having server racks installed but sitting idle just in case they might one day be needed, companies can rent extra capacity in the cloud and bring it online instantly.
So, as demands on the Qantas website spiked, capacity could have been scaled to ensure user access was maintained. The result? Much happier customers.
As well as getting its jets back into the clouds, it could be time for Qantas to take the same approach to the the data centre running its website.