Europeana crash prevention: Cloud and memcached
When I read today that Europeana, a digital library of Europe's cultural heritage "crashed just hours after it went online and will be out of operation for several weeks" I was pretty shocked.
How a website could crash and be offline for weeks in this age of flexible-scale Cloud offerings and caching technology is a bit mind-boggling--especially considering that a properly architected website should be easily portable to larger hardware or a scaled-out system.
There are a great many ways to deal with traffic bursts, from using Amazon S3 for storage, or EC2 for more machines, to Akamai for edge-caching to Memcached to alleviate database load.
Just by offloading the images from the repository, I bet Europeana would have fared just fine. If searching the database brought the site down then those guys are in for some very tough times.
It's one thing to be a victim of your own success (as the site says they are) and quite another to be hamstrung by not following best practices.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @dr138. 
