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The Year of Managing Peak Traffic Events, Freak Events and Flexible Global Architectures

By Suda Srinivasan, VP of Strategy and Marketing at Yugabyte

Managing (and Thriving) During Wider and Taller Peak Traffic Events

Peak events will continue to get ‘peakier,' driving the need for elastic database scalability on demand. It is increasingly important for technology teams to be able to scale quickly and easily whenever needed, then scale back down when demand subsides.

2023 was a record-breaking year for peak events. According to a recent Forbes article, Adobe Analytics reported $9.8 billion in Black Friday 2023 online sales, up 7.5% from 2022. On Cyber Monday, consumers spent a further $12.4 billion, a 9.6% increase from 2022.

Along with expected shopping peaks, some other major events had the potential to "break the internet" this year. Unfortunately for certain companies, some actually did! Taylor Swift's Eras Tour became one of the highest grossing concerts of all time, but also broke Ticketmaster's systems. The February Superbowl XLVII was the most-watched US-based telecast ever, attracting over 115.1 million viewers, but there were concerns with streaming lags and service unavailability.

Ensuring your service or application is correctly set up to meet these peak events is crucial. A great option is deploying a distributed SQL database which is specifically engineered with built-in resilience and infinite scalability on demand.

Freak Events Test Whether You Can Weather the Weather

Freak events - service disruptions caused by inclement weather, operator errors, geopolitical unrest, etc. - are set to become even more frequent and unpredictable in coming years, requiring database resilience and better BC/DR.

According to the European Environment Agency, Europe experienced the hottest summer on record in 2023, with over 460.000 hectares of forest destroyed by wildfires. By September 2023, the US had already set a record for the most natural disasters in a single year that cost $1bn+. These included fires, floods and extreme winds.

Fires, floods, wind, and snow can be catastrophic, causing extensive damage to data centers and other essential infrastructure. As well as physical damage, they can also cause outages and power cuts, which are equally harmful to industries like finance and retail that rely on maintaining highly available environments. Freak events have led to public cloud service outages, averaging one region-level outage every 51 days and innumerable availability zone outages.

Hurricanes, floods, and wildfires don't give engineering teams much warning. Databases need to be architected for high availability and resilience on the assumption that the underlying infrastructure is going to fail. Using a geo-distributed SQL database like YugabyteDB is an ideal way of avoiding business interruptions caused by infrastructure outages. Database clusters can be deployed across data centers, availability zones, and even cloud regions. Data in the cluster is automatically and synchronously replicated across at least three servers, so if an availability zone or region fails, the data is still available and no data is lost.

Distributed SQL databases are the perfect choice for companies that require seamless scalability and inherent resilience.

Flexible Global Architectures Are Needed More Than Ever

The demand for global databases will come from increasing compliance requirements for data residency as well as the need to serve data with low latency to a globally distributed user base. With more countries putting data residency regulations in place, global businesses will need to evaluate their databases to ensure they can be deployed in flexible global architectures.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (enacted on May 25, 2018) is the world's toughest data protection policy. It places strict requirements on businesses to protect personal data and privacy for EU citizens. If a business is not GDPR compliant, they can be fined up to €10 million, or up to 2% of the entire global turnover of the preceding fiscal year. These harsh penalties (along with reputational loss from media coverage) make it increasingly important for businesses to meet and comply with global regulations, wherever they are based. Having a flexible global architecture helps businesses avoid falling foul of these regulations.

The demand for global databases may be a result of increasingly stringent compliance requirements, but having flexible global architectures can also improve organizational privacy hygiene. Having a flexible global architecture gives businesses the ability to adapt to changing market and customer needs, and to serve data with low latency to a globally distributed user database.

Conclusion

While we would like to think that the economic pressures of the past are behind us, uncertainty in the market is set to continue as we enter 2024. This pressure will drive businesses to look for solutions that deliver operational efficiencies and decrease total cost of ownership.

People want to be sure that what they spend their money on is worth it, and gives them the experience they deserve. This approach will drive the demand for databases that offer familiar interfaces and give developers the ability to become productive quickly. It will also drive the demand for database-as-a-service (DBaaS). DBaaS offers an identical and uniform experience regardless of the infrastructure the databases are deployed on. This allows users to feel comfortable immediately without having to manage a steep learning curve. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suda Srinivasan is the VP of Strategy and Marketing at Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB, the distributed PostgreSQL database for modern applications. Prior to that, Suda was the VP of Marketing at Obsidian Security and at Dome9 before that. At Dome9, he led go-to-market execution and technology partnerships with leading cloud providers, driving significant year-over-year growth up to the company's acquisition by Check Point in 2018. He has also served in leadership positions in product marketing and consulting at Nutanix and Deloitte. Suda began his career in engineering at Microsoft and the IBM Almaden Research Center.