Social media marketing firm ViralMint rolled out a new feature that proved so popular that the increased customer traffic swamped the capabilities of the existing load balancer solution and greatly increased application response times. Lacking visibility into the volume or nature of its traffic, ViralMint had no idea how to address its issues. A fortuitous conversation led to the discovery of the Appcito Cloud Application Front End (CAFE) service, which allowed ViralMint to gain control of its cloud application traffic, retain its customers’ trust and build on its unexpected success.
Unexpected Success Threatens Core Business
ViralMint is an onsite marketing platform that helps retailers harness social media marketing to boost their marketing return on investment (ROI): acquire new fans, increase sales, improve conversion and boost engagement. ViralMint’s products—such as customized offers (e.g., coupons, discounts), a referral engine, exit targeting technology and on-screen promotions—depend on fast response times no matter how many customers are trying to access the ViralMint servers.
Founded in 2011, ViralMint was using the NGINX system as its load balancer and reverse proxy (i.e., an intermediary for one or more servers, allowing them to be contacted by any client) on its four application servers. This system worked fine initially, while traffic through the ViralMint servers was still relatively modest and predictable.
Recently, however, ViralMint added a new capability to its product suite that proved extremely popular with both active customers and many who had been dormant for some time. The popularity of the new feature was good news for ViralMint—until the unexpected traffic surge started affecting response times.
The NGINX system was not able to handle the increased load. Servers were dying and response times kept increasing. In addition, NGINX was unable to provide ViralMint with visibility into the incoming traffic, so the social media marketing company had no way to adequately plan its capacity to handle the influx.
Getting Back on Track
The ViralMint team attempted all kinds of approaches to solving their problem. The team tried installing New Relic software analytics but could not get the correct plug-in installed. The New Relic software was providing status on ViralMint’s control processing unit (CPU), memory and disk space; however, these were the least of their concerns at that time.
The team looked at the query time in their database server and found it to be normal. They found that when the server was placed independently, response time was fine. But when the server was placed behind the load balancer, response time skyrocketed.
ViralMint’s founder and CEO, Rohan Dighe, mentioned his company’s difficulties to a friend, who is also a product manager at Appcito. The friend suggested that the Appcito CAFE service might be what ViralMint needed. The Appcito CAFE service is a unified and cloud-native service that combines advanced load balancing and content-switching capabilities with integrated performance, security and continuous deployment services, as well as an insights engine that delivers fine-grained visibility into cloud application health and performance.
After some initial investigation, the decision was made to try the CAFE service. Using the CAFE Barista management module, it took only five minutes to set up and provision the as-a-service CAFE solution.
Immediately, CAFE provided the ViralMint team with the visibility to see what needed to be done—as well as the tools to act. Able to distinguish wanted from unwanted traffic, CAFE stopped spurious traffic, provided an accurate picture of all the incoming traffic, and enabled ViralMint to estimate the correct number of application servers needed and provision them quickly.
Appcito CAFE enabled ViralMint’s existing staff to deploy advanced cloud application delivery capabilities with minimal effort or additional training. The CAFE service’s autoscaling capabilities, even with multiple instances, meant that load balancing was no longer a bottleneck in ViralMint’s operations. ViralMint expanded from four to 10 application servers and was comfortably handling more than eight million requests per day with fast response times.
As a result of the Appcito CAFE service, ViralMint was able to retain the new customers attracted by its new feature, as well as attract additional customers. ViralMint and its customers are now confident in the availability of its products and services to share information, capture reviews and deliver offers—all with fast, predictable response times.
Siva Mandalam is vice president of products and strategy at Appcito, driving its cloud computing and security product vision, technology partnerships and go-to-market strategy. His expertise spans cloud, virtualization, application delivery control and security technologies. Prior to Appcito, Siva grew Cisco’s security business to more than US $2 billion and ran F5 Networks’ US $800 million ADC product line.
Rohan Dighe is the founder and chief executive officer of ViralMint. A product guy who loves building beautiful looking products on the social web, his entrepreneurial journey started in 2007 when he quit India’s top digital agency to found a social apps development company.