A case study of how the Twin Cities Marathon used the cloud to scale without introducing significant infrastructure cost and delivered a great fan experience.

1. Leveraging the cloud for
ultimate flexibility
Case Study: AthleteTracker
Neil Iversen
Director of Software Development, Avtex

2. Agenda
• Solution Overview
• Cloud First Design
• AthleteTracker Components
• Lessons Learned
• Questions

3. TWIN CITIES MARATHON ATHLETETRACKER
Tavis Hudson

4. ATHLETETRACKER: SOLUTION OVERVIEW

5. Spectator or runner goes to
AthleteTracker website to
register to use AthleteTracker
service
1

6. Attendees at the Race Expo sign
up for AthleteTracker using
Windows 8 modern application
2

7. Runner wearing a digital tracking chip
on their shoe crosses over time
tracking mats throughout the course
3

8. Fans receive SMS text messages via
their mobile phone of runners
progress during the race
4

9. AthleteTracker Results
19,363 spectators received text messages
151,483 text messages sent in 7.5 hours
50 states receiving text messages from runners
For less than $100 in race day server costs

10. ATHLETETRACKER: LOGICAL DESIGN

11. Website
Notification Receiver

12. What is the Cloud?
• Outside of your direct
control
• Limited responsibility

13. Common Cloud Offerings
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

14. Cloud First Design
• Take advantage of platform capabilities
• Embrace isolation and separation
• Asynchronous Scales

15. Application Anatomy
Interface
Processing
Persistence
Communication

16. Traditional 3-Tier
Client
Business Logic
Database

17. Modern Service Based Architecture
Client
Service Layer
Database

18. Modern Service Based Architecture
Client
Service Layer
Database

19. 1
2
34
5
Dimensions of Cloud Flexibility

20. 1
2
34
5
Athelete Tracker Requirements

21. Capacity
• Amount of work a component can perform
• Critical for big data or time sensitive applications
• Operations per second, throughput or storage amount

22. Capacity -
• Web Role
– Serves up site
• Infrastructure as a Serivce (IaaS) Virtual Machine
– Receives incoming runner data
• SQL Azure
– Writes hundreds of thousands of entries
– Keeps stats on SMS performance

23. Scalability
• Ability to match capacity with demand
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

24. AthleteTracker Demand
0
20000
40000
60000
80000
100000
120000
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76

25. • Windows Azure turn on and off virtual machines
• Upgrade/Downgrade website capacity
• Increase database throughput on the fly
Scalability -

26. Availability
• Ability to recover from adverse conditions
• Most commonly associated with datacenter recovery
• Cloud platforms allow for automatic and custom
failover scenarios

27. • Heavy use of Asynchronous Queues
• Redundant SMS Gateways
• Load monitoring and automatic balancing
Availability -

28. Maintainability
• Skill and time required to keep environment stable
• Networking components and server hardware failures
managed by the cloud
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) eliminates OS patching and
hardening

29. • Platform as a Service
– Queuing
– Web Site
– SQL Database
• Infrastructure as a Serivce (IaaS) for queue manager
Maintainability -

30. Affordability
• Will it break the bank?
• Not all applications fit a cloud model
• Critical to understand the application’s profile

31. • Mothball it after the race
• Scale up/down environment even during development
• Creating development/test environments smooth
process
Affordability -

32. LESSONS LEARNED

33. Lessons Learned
• Taking advantage of platform features saves
development time
• The cloud offers performance and reliability boosts but
has some sharp edges
• Testing an app to its breaking point and practice failure
scenarios for time critical applications

34. SUMMARY

35. Summary
• Cloud based application succeeded, and did it with
more flexibility
• Understanding your application is key to creating a
successful architecture
• Cloud providers offer a variety of options that can free
you from current limitations

36. avtex.com/atheletetracker

37. QUESTIONS?

38. Thank You!