Traffic lights for web developers

The recent rumblings from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano proved too much for the FlightRadar24 website which eventually ground to a halt. So did this teach web developers a thing or two?

Probably not unfortunately – but it did get one or two load balancing specialists trying to jump on the dust cloud bandwagon and talk about traffic management rules and flexible application health monitoring.

' Free image Wikimedia Commons

The trouble is (I would like to suggest) that a lot of web developers see themselves as web designers in the first instance. There will always be cross over between the developer/designer workflow as there is in most application environments. But essentially, the technology that exists at the "traffic layer" is not the first concern for the average web shop employee.

So what can we do?

For a 'does what it says on the tin' answer I turned to Zeus, a company that specialises in traffic management for web-enabled applications. The company's recently launched development license is targeted at web application developers to enable the creation, management and delivery of more reliable web applications – and it's free.

So if technology like the offerings from Zeus works as well as the company says it does, what will it take to get web developers working with web designers more closely so that integrating traffic management technology into web applications becomes more widespread?

According to Zeus, "If an application becomes hugely popular its success can quickly be diminished if the application crashes under the weight of demand so getting traffic management right first time is highly important. By working with Zeus, any application developer can build and test their applications using Zeus software on any platform, ensuring applications offer the quality of service expected by end users."

Taking a look around the company's website, it does come across as a pretty granular deep dive technology. If I knew how to convince web designers and developers to use load balancing technologies more effectively then I would probably be making a lot of money as a web specialist IT consultant. For now, we'll keep the blogs coming.

' Free image Wikimedia Commons