Bargain hunters were left high and dry when there were capacity issues with Click Frenzy last year, though this year’s event went “seamlessly," according to Akamai Australasia senior manager, Ian Teague.
“There was not a blip on our capacity radar,” he said.
Compared to last year when Click Frenzy ran into challenges, Teague said the difference with this year’s event was “the Akamai model.”
“Instead of everyone coming into a centralised datacente to try and retrieve information, we have turned that entire model on its head by having a distributive computing platform,” he said.
According to Teague, Akamai offloaded approximately 98.6 per cent of all requests that came through its platform, which deals with the user’s request to avoid overloading th
The origin of the data
Official figures from Akamai show that there were 169 million total requests delivered through its platform during the sale, with a peak of 29,722 requests per second.
Total traffic volume delivered came to approximately 3.3TB, with views per second peaking at 497.
Akamai’s figures were calculated based on the traffic it handled for the day of the event, spanning from 7pm, April 23 to 7pm, April 24.
“Ultimately, the retailers had a good event, which is really what it’s all about,” Teague said.
Drop in the ocean
As for whether the issues last year with Click Frenzy made Akamai more vigilant for this year’s sale, Teague said it was "business as usual" for the provider.
While Teague admits that Click Frenzy is a “great event for retail” and it puts the Internet on the map for commerce, he said the sale was still small in the overall scheme of things.
“We have literally have thousands of servers in all the major small to medium ISPs throughout Australia, and the events we do every day are such that this particular event wasn’t that large,” he said.
However, he adds that success of this year’s event helps customers feel confident that the Australian online industry has the ability to have a “structured, scalable service that they can go out and do more business.”
“Unfortunately, last year’s event didn’t work out and got a lot of attention for the wrong reasons,” he said.
“Going forward, you won’t see this being much of an issue at all.”
Teague said there were some retailers that did experience some scale challenges during Click Frenzy, but they were not Akamai customers.
“Those who were our customers had no scale challenges at all,” he said.
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.