Band Aid 30's Successful Deployment on Google Cloud Platform

The customer in this case study is Band Aid 30, a global philanthropic initiative aimed at raising funds for Ebola relief in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The initiative was conceived as a modern echo of the original Band Aid’s successful campaign to address hunger in Africa. The project involved organizing a live performance featuring dozens of the world’s top music artists, with the aim of raising awareness and funds for the cause. The website for this initiative was developed by Mukesh Randev and Jonathan Horne, web developers from Adtrak, a cutting-edge media agency based in the UK.

Band Aid 30, a global philanthropic initiative aimed at raising funds for Ebola relief, was faced with the challenge of organizing a live performance featuring dozens of top music artists. The project was to be executed in less than 14 days, with a small team of two web developers, Mukesh Randev and Jonathan Horne from Adtrak, a UK-based media agency. The task was to deploy a website that could handle heavy traffic from millions of followers of the participating artists. The website was to be hosted on Google Cloud Platform, a platform that was relatively new to the developers. The challenge was to ensure the website remained online and could handle the anticipated heavy traffic, while also being cost-effective.

The developers decided to use Google Cloud Platform for the project, with a focus on setting up automatic scaling to handle the expected load. They also used Google Cloud DNS to direct traffic to a Google Compute Engine instance hosting Wordpress and using a local instance of MySQL as the database. However, realizing that the website was entirely static with no dynamic elements, they decided to simplify the process. Instead of creating a load balancer, using replica pools, using autoscaler, and moving MySQL to CloudSQL with MemCacheD and configuring WordPress for performance, they simply copied the Band Aid 30 website to Google Cloud Storage. This approach leveraged Google's powerful distributed edge routing and caching system, which is designed to provide incredible performance for serving static content.

• The decision to use Google Cloud Platform and Google Cloud Storage for the Band Aid 30 website proved to be highly effective. Despite the heavy traffic on launch day, the website did not experience any performance hiccups or operational crises. The use of Google's distributed edge routing and caching system ensured that the website could handle the load and deliver the required performance. The simplicity of the solution also resulted in significant cost savings, with the cost of running the website on launch day being just $9.17. The successful execution of the project under pressure demonstrated the capabilities of the small team of developers and the effectiveness of the chosen solution.

• The website was developed and deployed in less than 14 days.

• The cost of running the website on launch day was only $9.17, a 99.92% discount from the original approach.

• The initiative raised over £2.5 million GBP, representing a 40,621,592.14% ROI, assuming all other costs of Band Aid 30 are zero.