Digital Events in 2021 and beyond: Scalability
By: Intergalactic Agency
Tags: Creative, Immersive Experience, Virtual Events, Thisisintergalactic, Digital

When planning a virtual event, scalability should be at the forefront of your mind and at the top of your event platform technical requirements. Simply put, scalability is the ease with which your event platform can add capacity and capabilities in response to increased demand in a dynamic environment.

For example, if you were expecting 10,000 attendees but now you have 100,000 signing on, congratulations — your event is a success! But, if your platform can’t cope, the event will quickly turn into a failure. A scalable system would allow you to add more processing power to handle the increased load without down time and without leaving your other partner systems — legacy systems not built for such high demand — behind. Ideally, this can be done automatically in response to more load (more load = more people on your system) once certain thresholds are reached. The key to scalability is to outline and prepare the solution the right way from the outset, which is something we’ve done with Event Xr.

From past events we’ve done over the years, such as our events with Cisco (21,500+ attendees) and our music festival sites (70,000+ attendees), we know the best and most effective ways to build in scalability. We have experience in this process from start to finish, and we know everything about creating a platform that doesn’t crack under pressure but thrives instead. We’ve seen what can happen when scalability isn’t a top priority, and we’ve learnt from the study of others to anticipate any issues rather than learn from painful experiences. When it comes to scalability and what you should be keeping in mind when planning your digital event, here are our top tips to ensure you are truly ready:

Prepare and plan

Preparing for all eventualities and making sure that the framework is there to support the event is the first step to planning for a successful, standout event. The best-case scenario is that your event attracts a much higher number of attendees than you initially thought. But on the flip side, if the framework isn’t there, the greater and more public the risk could be of failure. From the start of the process you should be thinking about numbers and how to create a seamless experience for all attendees. When it comes to the next steps (such as content, and rewards and engagement), the framework needs to already be there to support.

Event Xr is a platform that, by design, can cope with large numbers. A general rule of thumb is to plan for up to 10x the previous physical audience numbers for a virtual event (and sometimes more). The low barrier to entry of attending an online event means that you will likely attract a larger audience. We’ve seen some high-profile events struggle under the weight of their own success, including being cancelled due to unstable technology.

Put security at the top of your list

Equally critical to stability is security. Few things paint a bigger target to those with “questionable motivations” on their mind than a successful event. Whether the result of “white hat” hackers (people supposedly with goodness in their hearts just trying to highlight vulnerabilities to be corrected), or “black hat” hackers (bad people wanting to do bad things with your information), a breach is costly to reputation and can potentially result in fines. Now with the majority of events being moved to the online space, we’d highly recommend working with a platform that offers enterprise-grade security to eliminate any security risks from the get-go. Once the solution has been designed and built for security, ensure that it is stable and trustworthy through rigorous security testing. This testing MUST also include any supporting or integrated systems — it does no good to fortify your front door while leaving the side door to your best neighbour unlocked.

This approach was at the core of building the Event Xr platform — it’s fully capable of handling large global audiences reliably and securely, with enterprise-grade development and testing policies in place to ensure platform security.

Global audiences

We’ve talked about virtual events attracting more attendees than initially thought, but what does this mean, especially when it comes to global audiences? It means that users who might have previously been unable to get to your physical event are logging on to attend your digital event. In a way that has never been more relevant, these events have the potential to attract huge audiences in significant numbers. When considering additional scalability possibilities and looking at which platform you’ll be using for your digital event, ask these three essential questions:

1. Is the platform global?

2. Does the platform use edge cached content distribution networks to ensure distributed load and lag-free loading for users?

3. Can the platform cope with heavy bandwidth content, without it putting a strain on the technical architecture?

Global audiences and significant numbers potentially attending makes testing critical, and you’ll need the infrastructure to make this work. We’d recommend using cloud-based Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for virtual events that are being served to geographically separated areas. This is because CDNs cache your content at the network edge, geographically close to where the user is located to avoid data latency issues (time to get to server), or lag issues (time to process). We’ve tried and tested (and tested again!) how Event Xr copes with all of the potential roadblocks. From enabling registrations to managing personal data, our platform has been proven to cope with large audiences and bandwidth requirements on a global scale.

Check how everything works together

Scalability is about more than just the volume of requests that your events platform can handle. For large events, it’s important to keep in mind that there are many different systems at play, from registration to content hosting. Your scalability plans should include load testing of all component systems, how they speak to each other and work together, and peak loading scenarios that involve massively concurrent user requests. Ensure that you build for these scenarios, such as everyone choosing the same session at the same time or the triggering of surveys at the same moment of content completion. For example, if your keynote is over and 100,000 attendees are triggered to complete an evaluation at the same moment, make sure this is considered early on.

Your events platform should be confident with handling these, and it should help to keep your other systems from being overloaded and failing. This is especially relevant when dealing with older legacy systems, such as registration systems which were likely built for physical events. We’ve built Event Xr to help buffer the requests to older systems, smoothly managing all of the different systems involved.

Load testing

Testing is how you can evaluate your preparations and alleviate problems so that they can be dealt with way ahead of your event, avoiding the struggles we mentioned earlier. Load test all your event systems and associated APIs (how your system interfaces to other systems), not only based on the ‘up to 10x the number of anticipated users’, but also for the number of anticipated connections generated by those users. This difference is important as many systems will exchange multiple requests and messages between the component systems per user, per page. Get an accurate count of the number of such system exchanges, and then multiply this by the number of users to get your test loads. For load testing, it’s also important to keep in mind the situations and content for which your users will create concurrent demand on the systems. Planning for the global keynote to end at the same moment for everyone, and then trigger quizzes or evaluations? Make sure that your load tests don’t specify user volumes over an extended period of time if you’re expecting 20,000+ users to all begin doing the same thing at the same time. With Event Xr we test the whole of the platform, including any third party integrations, to ensure reliability.

No single point of failure

Scalable architecture also means eliminating single points of failure. For example, if you anticipate using your internally hosted corporate website/intranet as the entry path to your event, is your corporate site built to handle the anticipated load, or survive a data centre outage? Taking advantage of massively redundant infrastructure in the Cloud helps to ensure there is no single point of failure. You will want to review your solution architecture end to end, including entry points from the web, to identify and mitigate any single points of failure or systems not built for surge volumes. While sometimes surges in user demand are unavoidable, make sure that the solution you choose has caching and message queues to help you serve information quickly and manage requests in a timely, effective manner. Event Xr has the capability to do just that.

Monitor performance

Performance monitoring is one of the final aspects of scalability. The ideal time to know when your system is stressed is before it breaks while you can still take action, such as spinning up additional resources. Ideally, your system should be capable of automatically adding processing power in anticipation of need, or reducing processing power to control costs. Ensure that the system you implement has a dashboard with real-time performance monitoring of key system attributes including load, memory, response time and service status. We offer a fully detailed analytics package to help you understand and assess event performance, and to help optimise future iterations.

What we’ve outlined above are just some of the technical challenges that a well-architected system implemented by a knowledgeable partner will and should address. Check back for our next post, all about having a content-led approach and how to keep users engaged, interested and keen to explore. We’ll offer further insights and invaluable tips. Questions? Suggestions? Want to schedule a demo of the Event Xr platform? We’re always happy to continue the conversation or share our learnings if you’d like to reach out to us. Feel free to get in touch!

Intergalactic is an award-winning Creative Technology, providing services to major brands and projects around the globe. We specialize in creating value for our clients by creating and developing deep solutions that involve multiple mediums to create powerful experiences. Our work includes mobile apps, interactive screens, web development, application design and visualization.