We have a lottery draw every Saturday. It’s quite traditional in Finland and people are really active in playing it. Last week we had about 6.9 million Euros for the lucky person getting all seven numbers right. Finns played the game for a total of over 18 million Euros which was the new record. So it came Sunday and the clock was approaching 8.45PM. The draw was on. I was one of the suckers with my own numbers in as well. I was playing the online version of the game and did not have my numbers anywhere else than in veikkaus.fi which is the online game portal of the gaming monopoly in Finland.

The draw was over and clock was about 9 PM. I was trying to log in to the portal but did not even get the front page open. The site was down. A few minutes later the site was down still. It eventually took an hour until the site was functional again. This is a prime example of a site with highly variable traffic load and I can’t help but wonder if cloud computing could help in accommodating with the variable load. This is just a thought, since I don’t have any idea of the application architecture of veikkaus.fi or if it would even be legally possible to burst the excess traffic to, let’s say, Amazon. There are connectors to online banking facilities in veikkaus.fi for example which might make cloud bursting difficult. It would be interesting, though, if this would be possible. This actually is not the first time veikkaus.fi does not work right after the draw is done and I bet there are plenty of people eager and annoyed to not being able to check the results. Come on, I might be a millionaire and have to wait for this site to load!

I would imagine cloud bursting to be difficult, but by no means impossible if there is a will to do it.

Pauli Haikonen