Cloudflare Case Studies The Bay Lights

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	The Bay Lights Cloudflare

The Bay Lights

Cloudflare

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries	Construction & Infrastructure
Applicable Functions	Business Operation
Use Cases	Infrastructure Inspection
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Challenge	The Bay Lights were officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. Brian VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, knew there would be a surge in traffic to TheBayLights.org leading up to that day, and most likely a huge surge in traffic on the day of the unveiling. WPI has many sites on Cloudflare, including TheBayLights.org. He reached out to Cloudflare to make sure the site was ready to handle the increase in traffic. Cloudflare suggested a few small optimizations (minification, an image that wasn’t proxied because on a “grey cloud” DNS record), one useful reminder (white-list the Cloudflare IPs), and a powerful recommendation: Cache Everything. Read More
About Customer	The Bay Bridge is a major transportation infrastructure in the United States, connecting San Francisco to Oakland. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Bay Bridge, WPI founder Ben Davis came up with the idea to turn the West Span of the bridge into a canvas for light art. This project, known as The Bay Lights, was officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. The project's website, TheBayLights.org, is hosted on Cloudflare, a web infrastructure and website security company. The website was expected to experience a surge in traffic leading up to the unveiling day and on the day itself. Read More
Solution	To prepare for the expected surge in traffic, Brian VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, reached out to Cloudflare for assistance. Cloudflare suggested a few small optimizations, including minification and an image that wasn’t proxied because on a “grey cloud” DNS record. They also reminded WPI to white-list the Cloudflare IPs. The most powerful recommendation from Cloudflare was to Cache Everything. This means that not only static assets are cached, but also dynamic HTML is passed through to the customer’s web server. For heavy load, on content that is not changing rapidly, full HTML pages—or the entire site—can be delivered from Cloudflare’s global network, preserving the customer’s web server, database and other infrastructure. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Construction & Infrastructure

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Infrastructure Inspection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Challenge

The Bay Lights were officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. Brian VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, knew there would be a surge in traffic to TheBayLights.org leading up to that day, and most likely a huge surge in traffic on the day of the unveiling. WPI has many sites on Cloudflare, including TheBayLights.org. He reached out to Cloudflare to make sure the site was ready to handle the increase in traffic. Cloudflare suggested a few small optimizations (minification, an image that wasn’t proxied because on a “grey cloud” DNS record), one useful reminder (white-list the Cloudflare IPs), and a powerful recommendation: Cache Everything.

About Customer

The Bay Bridge is a major transportation infrastructure in the United States, connecting San Francisco to Oakland. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Bay Bridge, WPI founder Ben Davis came up with the idea to turn the West Span of the bridge into a canvas for light art. This project, known as The Bay Lights, was officially unveiled on March 5, 2013. The project's website, TheBayLights.org, is hosted on Cloudflare, a web infrastructure and website security company. The website was expected to experience a surge in traffic leading up to the unveiling day and on the day itself.

Solution

To prepare for the expected surge in traffic, Brian VanderZanden, Lead Developer at WPI, reached out to Cloudflare for assistance. Cloudflare suggested a few small optimizations, including minification and an image that wasn’t proxied because on a “grey cloud” DNS record. They also reminded WPI to white-list the Cloudflare IPs. The most powerful recommendation from Cloudflare was to Cache Everything. This means that not only static assets are cached, but also dynamic HTML is passed through to the customer’s web server. For heavy load, on content that is not changing rapidly, full HTML pages—or the entire site—can be delivered from Cloudflare’s global network, preserving the customer’s web server, database and other infrastructure.

Impact #1	On the day of the unveiling, with Cache Everything turned on, TheBayLights.org saw traffic increase with a decrease on their system’s resource utilization.
Impact #2	By mid-day, a rush in traffic caused more load than the event’s peak at 8:00 pm.
Impact #3	The site saw the largest influx of traffic between 8:00-9:00 pm, but the average I/O during that hour was under 2Mb/s.

Impact #1

On the day of the unveiling, with Cache Everything turned on, TheBayLights.org saw traffic increase with a decrease on their system’s resource utilization.

Impact #2

By mid-day, a rush in traffic caused more load than the event’s peak at 8:00 pm.

Impact #3

The site saw the largest influx of traffic between 8:00-9:00 pm, but the average I/O during that hour was under 2Mb/s.

Benefit #1	Traffic increase with a decrease on their system’s resource utilization.
Benefit #2	The average I/O during the peak hour was under 2Mb/s.
Benefit #3	By midnight traffic was back down to only 2X of baseline traffic levels.

Benefit #1

Traffic increase with a decrease on their system’s resource utilization.

Benefit #2

The average I/O during the peak hour was under 2Mb/s.

Benefit #3

By midnight traffic was back down to only 2X of baseline traffic levels.

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Overview

The Bay Lights

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit