The Calgary Stampede website management project was a critical undertaking that involved managing the website for one of the largest and most well-known events in Canada. The Calgary Stampede event runs for 10 days in the first week of July each year, and the website experiences high traffic for about a month before and during the event. During this period, the traffic on the website increases by 500 times compared to regular days, and it is essential to ensure that the infrastructure can handle this traffic without causing any downtime.
The website for the Calgary Stampede event is built using PHP and uses MySQL in the background. One of the most challenging aspects of managing this website is maintaining scalability while deploying new updates released by the developers. The website management team must ensure that the website is up-to-date with the latest features and security patches without causing any disruptions to the users during the peak traffic period.
To ensure that the website is highly available and scalable, the project team implemented various strategies, including load balancing, caching, and CDN (Content Delivery Network) services. Load balancing helps distribute the incoming traffic to multiple servers, ensuring that no single server becomes overloaded. Caching is used to store frequently accessed data in memory, reducing the number of database queries required to serve each request. CDN services are used to store static content, such as images and videos, on servers closer to the users, improving the website's performance and reducing latency.
One of the most challenging aspects of managing the Calgary Stampede website is the need to maintain high levels of availability and scalability while deploying new updates. To accomplish this, the project team implemented a streamlined DevOps process and used continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This approach allowed the team to deploy new updates quickly while ensuring that the website remained highly available and scalable.
Overall, managing the Calgary Stampede website was an interesting and rewarding experience for the project team. The team was responsible for ensuring that the website remained functional and responsive during the event's peak traffic period, which required careful planning and execution. The project team had to work closely with the developers to ensure that the website was updated regularly with new features and security patches without causing any disruptions to the users. Through these efforts, the website remained a reliable and engaging platform for visitors to the Calgary Stampede event, and the project team successfully delivered a high-quality user experience to millions of users.
