THE WEATHER COMPANY - Is an IBM business

According to their website, weather websites like weather.com and wunderground.com, face an exponentially harder scalability challenge - and their ability to perform at a high level during periods of intense demand can literally spell the difference between life and death.

To overcome this, during major weather events, The Weather Company relies on its infrastructure to deliver very high performance when its servers are under the most intense load. Extreme weather systems are often fast-moving and difficult to predict, so to handle massive, short-notice peak workloads, the company depends on the ability to scale up rapidly at any time.

Since weather is a hyper-local phenomenon, the scalability of the web platform needs to be localized, too. As The Weather Company expands its operations into markets such as Japan, India and Eastern Europe, it needs to be able to harness local data centers to bring its endpoints closer to the user to minimize latency. Localizing its data centers adds further complexity to the scalability challenge, because each local instance must be able to scale independently. For example: a tornado in the US Midwest creates demand peaks in that region, with little effect on operations elsewhere. Another example: would be bushfires in New South Wales, Australia. The only potential blip on the radar would be media driven interest, that tends to generate temporary international interest from other geographical locations.

Five years ago, The Weather Company started moving its infrastructure into the cloud, architecting most of its systems around the services offered by its cloud provider. The cloud platform helped to address the company’s scalability challenges, but also locked it into using proprietary technologies.

Jagmeet Chawla, Global Head of Architecture Office and Cloud Engineering at The Weather Company is quoted as saying: “Today there are much better options for building cloud solutions on open-source software. To put ourselves in a stronger position to meet future growth and scalability challenges, we decided to re-architect all our cloud services using open-source tools in the IBM Cloud. Our web platform was the perfect place to start.”

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Jonathan Batty
IBM Europe
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LINKS & REFERENCE

https://www.ibm.com/case-studies/the-weather-company-hybrid-cloud-kubernetes

https://mas400.com/
https://newsroom.ibm.com/then-and-now