Comparethemarket.com tests Amazon Web Services to meet peaks in demand

Comparethemarket.com, the popular insurance comparison website, is testing one of its products on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to see whether the cloud platform can be reliably used to meet peaks in demand.

The pilot has been running this week, with the unnamed product running on AWS instead of the company's data centre.

The aim, said information technology director James Lomas, was to see how well AWS performed compared to in-house resources and to take steps towards using the cloud to handle sudden spikes in demand - instead of over-buying hardware in a bid to anticipate demand.

"What are you going to do? Are you going to create enough capacity to cater for that spike in traffic? You guess at that, then add a bit on top as well to be on the safe side. And then you can be stuck with all that unused computer resource that you are going to pay for," said Lomas.

At the moment, Lomas does not believe it's yet tenable to simply spin-up an extension to the corporate data centre on a cloud service in an ad hoc manner to satisfy sudden peaks in demand.

"One of the products will be wholeheartedly moved on to Amazon infrastructure. We will check that we get the benefits in terms of the three S's - stability, speed to market and scalability. Once we are comfortable that we can operate it, we don't have to prove the technology; it'll be proven," said Lomas.

Once the company is satisfied that it will get the same performance with AWS that it would out of its own data centre, it will take steps to design a system for all its products to be able to use AWS to handle peaks in demand.

Comparethemarket.com used to be a distant number three in the insurance price-comparison market - until the recruitment of Aleksandr Orlov, the Eastern European meerkat entrepreneur, to head the company's marketing campaign.

The popularity of Orlov helped to propel the company ahead of its rivals - who could only respond with annoying opera singers or badly drawn cartoon mascots.

Coming soon: Computing's CIO interview with Comparethemarket.com's James Lomas, who reveals more details about the company's experiments with cloud computing, and how it is fostering an entrepreneurial environment for its IT teams.

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