Anyway, this started a train of thoughts. Were I planning the technology end of a product launch, how would I prepare to deal with unanticipated demand? The problem with unanticipated demand is that you don’t know how many resources need to be set aside to cope with or load-balance. To me the answer is relatively simple. Leverage cloud computing resources. Build and use your front end for launch day on the cloud, preferably a cloud service that auto-scales to meet demand. Microsoft Azure would seem a great candidate for such a task, as it seems to extend the Windows Server platform nicely. You pay for the extra resources and bandwidth you utilize, but having a working front end on the most important day in your product’s lifecycle far outweighs the cost.

Simply planning ahead with the thought to use the ‘unlimited’ resources of a cloud computing platform for a product launch would be my preferred method of preparing for a major product launch.

Please leave me your thoughts below.