How we saved the polar bears in the "cloud"

Polar bears have serious problems now. The Arctic is becoming increasingly polluted, rapidly (by the standards of evolution) is warming, and bears are also knocking out poachers. But an ordinary person knows little about the cares of the bears, so the “greens” thought up to do a large-scale action to help the bears. The tool is the site where you need to click on the ice so that it increases. One person - one pixel of ice.



The project had several goals. This includes raising money to help bears, and alerting people about the real threat of melting glaciers. For example, if a person adds a bear to an ice floe (buys it) - he really helps him - transfers money to the WWF project fund. And if he shares it in social networks, he notifies his friends about the threat of melting glaciers (with a request to expand the habitat of bears).
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So, about a year ago we visited the event of the “greens”, listened to their story about the bears, and decided to help them. They offered to stay for free in our “cloud”, because the usual hosting could not stand. Below are technical details of how a large advertising campaign looks like from the “cloud” point of view and why a bear should not be taken with an infrared camera.

The technical task was as follows:

• The server on the application and the server on the database, plus the ability to scale.
• 50 GB for the application.
• 20 GB of traffic per day.
• SSH, MySQL5, PHP 5.4, apache 2.2, Ubuntu, git, ngnix, memcache
• Backup
• 100,000 users per day (IP).

Agreed on the following:

1. 100,000 visits per day is 10 hours a day, 10,000 visits per hour. This is about 3 visits per second. If you think - quite a bit. If the site is written normally, a server with 2 physical cores and 8GB of RAM should suffice.
2. Disk laid 100GB.
3. Network traffic (about 20 GB per day outgoing, incoming 1 GB) - about 600 GB of outgoing and 30 GB of incoming per month.
4. If the server capacity is not enough, then it can always be increased. The upper limit for 1 server is 32 virtual cores, 128 GB of RAM. That is, you can grow in power by 16 times. Or, run an additional server next to it and parallelize the load.
5. Monitoring of the load on the site and timely shutdown-on of the server with a change in its capacity (we had to prevent the site from falling).

What did the application do?

So, the user visits the site and clicks on the ice floe. Floe grows, the user shares this fact. From his link from social networks come new people, who then bring more new people and so on. Some also buy a bear for 100 rubles or 1000 rubles (make a small donation). Plus, it was possible to buy a logo placement for 30,000 rubles (the company used this chip) or use various additional functionality, sharpened for stars and media people.

What was done outside?

At first, traffic came mainly from banner ads (there were quite a lot of it) and organics due to this kind of outdoor advertising:



Then traffic from social networks and from mail began to come fairly stable. It turned out to be surprisingly a lot of search queries - apparently, people did not memorize the site address itself, but searched for a slogan. But from www.WWF.ru , of course, they also came.

The site was written really well, the customer configured the server himself and did it quite competently too. Scale as a result is not required. The biggest peak in terms of traffic and traffic happened on February 27 (it seems after the television story), and on this day, a lot of people came to the site. In general, the load increased by an order of magnitude from the usual one and took away 37 thousandths of a percent of the total bandwidth of the communication channels of our “cloud”.

There were a couple fewer peaks with the same result. In general, worried in vain, even a bunch of viewers can not be compared in power with a weak DDoS-attack.

results

Now the project is over. The advertising agency BBDO, which developed the project for WWF, received an award for it in Cannes - the project “All for Bear” was recognized as the best socially responsible advertising case in the world in the Act Responsible competition, plus it collected even smaller awards.

Naturally, we were interested in how many bears were able to help. We learned this: one of the most effective tools of assistance is the so-called “bear patrol”. With the funds collected for the staff of the Bear Patrol, you can buy transport and equipment (they ride snowmobiles) so that the patrol can monitor the white bears, prevent conflicts between humans and the predator, and track poachers. By approximate estimation, such actions save the lives of up to 5 polar bears per year (not very much at first glance - but very important for a shrinking population). Of course, the patrol is not the only direction of help, but according to other vectors, it is very difficult to assess the effect “in bears”.

Interesting

Well, once you have come, I will tell a couple of facts about polar bears that impressed me:

• Polar bears dig their own housing in the snow. Therefore, it is very important for them to have a sufficient area of ​​ice (with snowy debris) for successful wintering. During hibernation, bears almost do not lose calcium in the bones.
• The brown bear and the polar bear have the possibility of interspecific crossing, and their offspring are also capable of reproduction.
• A bear is almost useless to search in the infrared spectrum. Wool is tubular (hairs are hollow), which provides thermal insulation better than in data centers. Therefore, despite the high internal temperature, the bear almost does not give off heat to the environment.
• At the same time, the polar bear's skin is very dark: when a bear goes out in the sun, it helps to warm up faster. By the way, the hair is translucent - the sunlight completely passes to the skin.