Release It!, 2nd Edition

Aftermath

The grim march in the days and weeks following launch produced impressive improvements. The CDN’s engineers redeemed themselves for their “sneak preview” error before launch. In one day, they used their edge server scripting to help shield the site from some of the worst offenders. They added a gateway page that served three critical capabilities. First, if the requester did not handle cookies properly, the page redirected the browser to a separate page that explained how to enable cookies. Second, we could set a throttle to determine what percentage of new sessions would be allowed. If we set the throttle to 25 percent, then only 25 percent of requests for this gateway page would serve the real home page. The rest of the requests ...