Last week, our nation's roads were clogged with travelers excited to reach the path of totality to view the solar eclipse. But those who couldn't make the journey were able to live stream the event thanks to NASA, which had worked for three years to make sure traffic wouldn't be a problem for their viewers in cyberspace.
InfoZen, which describes itself as a DevOps cloud shop, was in charge of hosting the streaming as part of its Web Enterprise Service Technology contract with NASA. The endeavor utilized all sets of InfoZen's cloud technology, but also took an ecosystem, which included Limelight's (NASDAQ:LLNW) content delivery network (CDN).
"The event was an ideal use case for cloud elasticity and the pay-as-you-go model," said Sandeep Shilawat, InfoZen cloud program manager. "It was hard to estimate the popularity of the event. There were numbers, but every number was getting dwarfed by (new) estimates."
While neither Limelight nor NASA has released the total number of eclipse viewers, Limelight did provide a sampling based on viewership. According to those statistics, the most viewers came from California, which had 12.9% of overall; Florida with 7.38%; and Texas with 7.13%.
Mike Milligan, senior director, product and solution marketing, Limelight, noted, however, that when his company looked at viewership in terms of a state's population, a small guy came out on top. The state with the largest percentage of viewers based on population was Rhode Island, followed by Alabama and Louisiana. The eclipse also attracted international viewers. More than 15% of those who came to NASA's site to view the event were outside of North America.
"People in other parts of the world could not participate in watching (outside) and had to think about where to go. Who (did they) trust? NASA was the place," Milligan said.
In preparing for the event, a number of variables were taken into consideration, including a global audience and weather. "Most of the weather, we heard, was good. That definitely normalized some of the traffic," Shilawat said. "Had it been a different season, the response (would have been) different."
Shilawat said the overall planning involved creating "a backup for the backup for the backup" that included all components of the ecosystem. In the end, all the preparation paid off and issues remained minimal, with only a few feeds and cameras going down.
"Overall, (viewers) could enjoy the event to its fullest," Shilawat said.
"It was a busy day, but a day that we had anticipated and were prepared for," Milligan added.
