Grand National 2021: Managing Extreme Online Demand at William Hill
summary
William Hill precomputes a 16x peak target by splitting users into cohorts, then tests, tunes, and scales services, offloading to cloud and caching. Traffic logic runs at CloudFront using lambda@edge to set an existing‑customer cookie and to call a third‑party queueing system that admits a zone count (10 at start), returns 200 or 503, and serves an HTML wait page. The queue prevents overload, queues appear only ~10 minutes pre‑race, and recovery hits normal within an hour.
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