Mega events: take control of your website traffic
With Akamai’s and Queue-It’s virtual waiting room
We all know the benefits of a strong CDN by now. Caching content reduces server load and network latency, improves loading speed, optimizes availability, and increases website security. Saving costs, for example by reducing bandwidth, is a nice bonus. But is this enough in the case of mega events?
Relieve the origin with content caching
Evolane’s CDN partner Akamai boosts website performance by providing cached pages at the edge of the Internet and close to the customer, through more than 300,000 servers around the world. Evolane and Akamai are teaming up to use this content delivery network to relieve the customer’s application and infrastructure of thousands of requests. But for special events that generate exceptionally high and simultaneous web traffic, we need more than this.
Virtual waiting rooms for mega-events
For example, requests that handle ticket sales for mega events and the like cannot be cached and thus have an impact on the servers. Every website is limited in the amount of traffic it can handle. In other words, a unique solution is needed to prevent bottlenecks on your infrastructure and applications, but an on-demand scalable site is a technical challenge with a serious cost. A virtual waiting room can offer a solution, by easing the burden of requests on your application.
“A virtual waiting room can offer a solution, by easing the burden of requests on your application.”
COVID-vaccin certificates
Evolane brought Akamai EdgeWorkers and Queue-It together and implemented a secure virtual waiting room for the distribution of Covid-19 vaccination certificates. This waiting room is activated during busy hours during logging in, to prevent the website from being overflowing with requests. As a result, companies regain control of their environment and visitors who reach the site get the user experience they deserve.
The blind spot of client-side integrations
For Queue-It’s client-side connector, JavaScript code is inserted into the relevant pages to be protected by the waiting room, which is simple and quick to implement. However, this approach proves to be less secure than server-side connectors, as tech-savvy end users can manipulate the client code and skip the queue. We prefer the server-side integration of Queue-It, because the server-side execution ensures that the client code cannot be manipulated.
Extra safe with Akamai EdgeWorkers
But how exactly do Akamai Edgeworkers work? When a user makes a request to your backend, Akamai activates the ‘queue IT worker’. These workers validate the requests and redirect the visitors – if necessary – to the queue. The additional advantage is that you can offer your customers real-time information and communication. Meanwhile, cached pages can continue to be used by the CDN, without a queue. Akamai’s web application firewall, DDoS prevention and bot management also continue to do their job. They know the reason for the wait, the position in the queue, the number of others waiting and even get customized live messages. Virtual waiting has never been so safe and comfortable!
Read our other blogs
Phishing
Brand protectorStrengthen the security of your brand against phishing-attacksIn the digital age we live in, cybercriminals are a constant threat. These threats have evolved over the years and have become more comprehensive, including phishing, the creation of fake...
A Day In The Life Of …
our Perfomance Engineer DylanMeet Dylan! He started at Evolane five years ago as a newbie, as part of an internship… Today, Dylan is a permanent member of the Performance Monitoring Team. And what a member! As a Dynatrace performance engineer, he plays a critical role...
Breaking the Ransomware Kill Chain
During Cybersec Europe 2023The threat of ransomware attacks is at an unprecedented peak. By 2022, half of all organisations will experience an attack of this category. This came as a total surprise to half of them, because they were convinced that they were...