So with possibly NASA’s largest mission since landing man on the Moon, The Curiosity Rover was certainly the largest enterprise in keeping the world up to date live with the landing. So the question is – what is required to power this enterprise on line?

Well, the answer is that NASA was making use of Amazon Web Services as shown in this

As you can see in the article, not only did this allow for a completely scalable solution, it also was extremely fast to design and set up.

Running in various regions and load balancing across over 300 caching instances this is a massive system and can be scaled up or down as quickly as needed. Creating identical instances and bringing them into the cluster in next to no time was obviously vital to this coverage – and this is one of AWSs greatest strengths as there is no redundant hardware when the load drops off again.

So, literally hundreds & hundreds of servers/instances went into allowing us to get up at 4am to watch this awesome event!