When Carrenza Client Tribal asked us to build them a platform for a hugely innovative online version of the daddy of all board games we knew we had a challenge. The last project we had done for the same client back in 2005 was a huge success and this time round an integration with Google Maps and a global focus gave us new challenges. 

For us this was the sort of project we love. The timelines were short, and the likely demand meant we had to deliver on a number of fronts at the same time. the challenge was, however clear. Take an innovative application from a developers laptop and make it work for a global audience of many millions in only 4 weeks. 

The project started with understanding the application to be hosted and working with the Tribal development team to ensure the application was developed to allow it to scale horizontally as efficiently as possible. 

At the same time we developed the servers we needed, stripped down, objective focussed devices designed to serve content or process data as efficiently as possible. These servers were designed to work as part of a huge pool should we need to scale to deal with the game proving as popular as expected. 

Once we had the application on the servers we ran a load testing program to determine the optimum load for each server. The flexibility of the Carrenza Cloud then allowed us to tune hardware and load balancing to make the servers run as efficiently as possible.

Nobody knew how popular the game would be, so we were asked to build to meet the desired load and then be able to scale rapidly in the event the game was more popular than expected.

A combination of a great game, a great brand and what always happens when something good hits the web 2.0 sites made this the biggest hit online in 2009. Load was many, many times more than expected and we had to add 300 servers to the platform in a matter of hours. 

What the platform achieved was astonishing; a peak of 2 billion result sets per second delivered out of the data tier; 15 billion page impressions a month, more concurrent users than World of Warcraft and, from an efficiency perspective, we delivered 15% of the page impressions Facebook delivered on 0.5% of their infrastructure. 

Services Used

• Application consultancy
• Bespoke platform build
• Load testing
• Carrenza CHS infrastructure
• Platform management services