Autocosmos.com: Fighting Traffic Peaks by Leveraging Windows Azure

You’ve just signed a big partnership and expect traffic to your site to increase. Oh-oh, what if your site can’t handle the load? Autocosmos.com is a web portal that allows users from eight Latin-American countries find the best car deals, offer cars for sale, and find quality car insurance, among other services. Following a strategic regional alliance with Yahoo! that made Autocosmos.com its official car site for some Hispanic audiences, the company needed to prepare its news platform to be able to receive a big increase in its site visitors, and successfully respond to a massive number of requests.

Autocosmos.com chose Windows Azure as its scalable cloud platform to handle peak loads. The news solution that originally ran off SQL Server was moved SQL Azure, and the portal was redesigned to use ASP.NET MVC. Thanks to the work done on the platform, Autocosmos.com can now easily handle peaks of thousands of active users per second without having to invest in a huge infrastructure: they just increase Azure Web Roles when hitting those peaks, and quickly decrease them when not needed.