Daily Archives: July 25, 2012

Scaling the Olympics Web Site

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Sporting events aside, the Olympics are a testbed for new technologies, especially when it comes to matters of scale. As millions of fans worldwide check out results, it simply must be able to handle the load. What follows below is the story of how they’re testing the Olympics web site performance in preparation for the event itself.

Known as CloudTest, SOASTA’s testing tool taps into 17 cloud services around the world, including Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure as well as similar services from IBM, the Texas-based Rackspace, and smaller outfits such the San Francisco-based GoGrid. In testing the Olympics website, the company simulated activity from servers running everywhere from the United States to Europe to Hong Kong, hitting the site with traffic from as many as 500,000 virtual machines at any given time.

via How Do You Break the Olympics Website? Throw a Cloud at It | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Making apps without a programming language

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Here’s an interesting story from The Economist:

LAST year Eddie the pig took Chile by storm. The iPhone game “ePig Dash”, featuring Eddie, dislodged “Angry Birds” to become the number-one paid game on the Chilean App Store. By itself, the story of a cute, if flatulent, pig pushing a bunch of irate birds off the top spot is nothing unusual. What is odd is that the creator of “ePig Dash”, a conjuror and economics teacher, knew little or nothing about programming. Instead he used GameSalad, a do-it-yourself tool for app-makers.

via Do-it-yourself apps: Make your own Angry Birds | The Economist.

Some more information about GameSalad:

GameSalad is an online community that empowers everyone to express and share their ideas through games. Our company was founded on the belief that all people should have the tools to make popular games, limited only by the boundaries of their imaginations. GameSalad provides a platform used by creators to rapidly design, publish and distribute original games that have been played by millions of people worldwide.