Honored to be joined by Adam Clark and Peter Vanhee of hugely successful British charity, Comic Relief. You can read more about Red Nose Day here but, for the purpose of this technology blog, here’s the short version – they raise over £60M ($US80M+) in one evening, processing as much as 300 donations per second. No they’re not wearing capes, but maybe they should be…

I’m sure there are folk out there thinking “hey, my infrastructure can handle that”. I get it, but can you cost effectively acquire, stand up, maintain without having a heart attach, and then tear down that infrastructure without upsetting a single user/customer? Well, these guys can.

Things learned in this episode:

• DPS – understanding this hot new metric Donations Per Second
• Planning architecture for 1 evening’s use
• The level of observability it takes to ramp up to a 1000x workload in one evening with confidence. Hint: IOpipe was key
• The cultural aspect of building and running their donation service. Hint: how they communicate with each other is a big part.

Enough words form me, watch now:

Thanks for listening!