DrupalCon New Orleans 2016: Handling Powerball Night: Scaling Patch.com

This talk details Patch.com's experience managing surging traffic following a major Powerball drawing, where standard datacenter links were saturated. The speaker discusses the rapid deployment of scaling solutions through CDN providers and other traffic-management strategies, emphasizing the complexity of configuring and transitioning systems under tight deadlines. Key topics include optimizing HTTPS for scale, configuring cache lifetimes for effective content invalidation, and balancing geographic proximity with caching. The presentation also highlights the use of Surrogate-Control headers and Varnish's grace mode as contingency plans, all while ensuring compatibility with Drupal's cache invalidation mechanisms.