Joyent Case Study on Socialbomb
The Challenge
As a social technology company, Socialbomb helps clients deploy highly effective social media apps across multiple platforms and services. No simple task. And social media apps can detonate at any time: when a thoughtful, well-timed fusion of product marketing meets social media sharing, the supporting computer systems can see a shock wave of activity as users log in to get connected. With this volatile mix of multiple platform and service support, on-demand capacity, and total reliability, Socialbomb had to construct a stable computing system that could handle it all.
Scalability
Scalability goes both ways—up and down. When applications or marketing campaigns gain popularity, Socialbomb servers process tremendous network and database activity. And after campaigns run their course, computing requirements may decline as traffic falls off. Planning and scaling a traditional data center for this kind of activity is nearly impossible or at best wasteful. To accommodate the highest level of activity, Socialbomb would have to over-provision a data center to handle the highest peak; when traffic died down, system resources would sit idle.
Platform Flexibility
Moving data between Web sites, phones, Blu-ray players, and onto multiple social media sites requires not just engineering expertise but also an open, feature-rich development platform that’s up to the challenge.
Our good friends at Joyent (our intrepid and ever-friendly hosting company) wrote up a case study on our usage of their services. If you’re curious about how we do things at scale, you should check it out!
Also, don’t miss the Zeus case study on our work with them!
- Mike
