With an audience of more than 80 million home cooks and 1.5 billion customer touchpoints across digital, print, television, online and integrated platforms every year, Allrecipes is an exemplary digital business. The company prides itself on offering recipes, community, advice and personalized shopping recommendations whenever their loyal audience needs it.

With a robust IT infrastructure built on premises, Allrecipes was facing a challenge when it came to scaling up for its busiest times of the year, which typically hit right before major holidays. “The day before Thanksgiving we might handle a month’s worth of traffic in a single day,” said John Keane, chief technology officer, Allrecipes. “While our datacenters were optimized to handle this kind peak traffic, we recognized the need for a more efficient solution that could scale down during non-peak periods.”