Al Jazeera: Handling traffic spikes with cloud services and Drupal

The recent Egyptian revolution which saw the overthrow of former President Mubarak garnered worldwide publicity with millions of viewers tuning in to Al Jazeera for live broadcasting on the day-to-day events.

By Uzair Parker

8 Mar 2011

The online global interest saw the media conglomerate of the Middle East reach peak records in traffic to its site as the news agency's web servers were strained to the maximum.

To counter the surge, Al Jazeera transfered its Drupal-based live blog, Al Jazeera Live, to Acquia's fully managed Cloud Platform which is suited to meet the demands of larger, traffic-intensive sites. The service is specifically tailored towards Drupal and provides all the redundant performance technologies such as http cache, memcache, load balancing and clustered web and database servers all of which plug easily into the popular web CMS. All of the back-end resources are designed to improve scalability, reliability and performance and allow for the scaling-up and down elasticity that we would expect from Cloud services.

Read the full article on www.memeburn.com.

About the author

Uzair Parker is a staff reporter at [[www.memeburn.com]].