No Surprise: Weather Company Uses Cloud to Forecast Bad Weather
Excuse the irony, but did you know that the Weather Company has heavily implemented cloud infrastructure?
When severe weather happens, Weather.com can sometimes get hammered with server requests. IT analysts at the Weather Company say that traffic can go above 20x times the norm during a large weather event. When the Weather Company is making predictions that help people safe, the last thing they need to worry about is server infrastructure.
“For us, the days the infrastructure is the most tasked are the days you need to be focused on the business and not on the back end,” mentions Landon Williams, VP of infrastructure, architecture and services at The Weather Company.
“We have to make sure we perform the best when the weather is at its worst. Our whole ecosystem has to handle it,” added Williams.
During normal months, the Weather Company says that its websites get about 125M visitors per month. When severe weather happens, IT analysts inside the Weather Company have seen their websites get over 100M visits in one day. Using cloud infrastructure to host the Weather company’s gambit of websites such as (Weather.com and Wunderground.com) seemed like a natural fit.
However, what do you do when you have 13 data centers already in your ecosystem? You migrate to cloud anyways. Currently, the Weather Company uses about 80% cloud and 20% on-premises. The Weather Company says that they are saving over 10% per month on their infrastructure costs and that they plan on migrating the rest of the workloads into the cloud throughout the next 18 months.
In addition to using AWS, the Weather Company has also started deploying workloads into IBM’s SoftLayer. By spanning over multiple clouds, the Weather Company can ensure that it always has services available for its customers, regardless if one of its cloud vendors is experiencing an outage.
