Media companies are all too familiar with programmes and events sending huge spikes in traffic. This has prompted the team at digital agency Monterosa Productions to use Amazon’s cloud service to host The Apprentice Predictor, which is kept running through each episode of the show so fans can predict who will get fired.

The company previously used the same service for the BBC’s Visual Radio trial in January, through which listeners could see Chris Moyles at work and interact with him through messaging and polls. Monterosa is also developing the next version of the BBC’s fantasy football-style Celebdaq game in the cloud and expects to use Amazon’s service during peak traffic.

“The cloud is fantastic at handling traffic spikes around events like The Apprentice,” says Simon Brickle, project director at Monterosa. “We could pay £400 a month per server when they’d only be used for an hour a week, or we can pay Amazon by the minute for what we need and make a huge saving.

“Setting up capacity on the cloud can take some getting used to, but now we’ve done it we can switch on extra servers easily and scale up and down really quickly,” he adds.
Monterosa is in the process of training staff at its hosting sites to operate the extra servers it commissions and provide support. “The cloud’s very robust but you don’t get any guarantees, and that’s not good enough for our clients. So we’ve been providing support ourselves, just in case,” says Brickle.

“We can do this during each episode of The Apprentice but for longer projects we’re working on using our host’s 24/7 support team to provide a service-level agreement our clients are happy with.

Thanks to NMA for the case studies