cloud / systems
Taking static delivery off the web servers
Introduced Akamai CDN to cache around 90% of our objects close to users, easing pressure on a bare-metal origin farm.
~90% objects cached near usersRead the project story
The starting point
In 2008, the platform ran on bare-metal web servers behind a single load balancer. There was no caching layer: requests for static content went straight to the web-server farm. As a weather-service provider, we faced extreme swings in demand. Depending on the weather and other major events, individual days brought around 20 times the usual traffic—comparable in scale-up to a retailer’s Black Friday surge. We needed a system that could scale with those peaks.
The bottleneck
At high request rates, available socket capacity became a bottleneck. The website could become unresponsive even though much of the demand was for content that did not need to be served repeatedly by the origin.
The change
With Akamai, around 90% of our objects could be cached close to users. Only about 10% of requests still reached the origin—roughly 90% request offload. That relief allowed us to shrink the web-server farm.
More room to operate
We also gained another way to manage busy days: extending cache lifetimes for suitable content could reduce origin load further. That meant choosing where a longer cached lifetime was acceptable rather than applying one setting to everything.
The lesson: serve repeatable content closer to users, and treat cache policy as an operational lever—not just a performance setting. Historical project summary; infrastructure identifiers and internal operating details are intentionally omitted.