The goal of the Amsterdam Museum Night Foundation, also called n8, is to connect younger generations with Amsterdam’s rich museum culture. The highlight of n8’s event schedule is Museum Night. On Museum Night, participating museums stay open until 2 a.m. for one night in November. This event, which began in 2000, has grown into a popular annual social outing.
In 2010, n8 focused its event campaigning on its social media outlets and its website. The n8 website has become an integral part of the event. Due to the popularity of Museum Night, n8 knew that its website hosting server may not be able to handle the increase in activity immediately before and during the event.
In response to this temporary spike in website visitor activity, n8’s website hosting provider, Webslice, suggested Amazon Web Services (AWS). Webslice explained that n8 would be able to utilize AWS on a momentary basis to handle the added load to the website and then return to its original hosting server after the annual event ended. n8 agreed with Webslice’s purposed solution. According to Jelle Spanjaard, n8’s online content manager, the foundation was particularly impressed that AWS would allow it to access the necessary server space without having to invest in any hardware.Webslice established n8’s website, and the mobile version of the website, using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the resizable computing service, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), the scalable cloud-based database. Webslice also used Amazon’s Web-based storage solution, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). To further enhance the website’s ability to handle the spike in visitor traffic, Webslice used the Elastic Load Balancing feature within Amazon EC2. The Elastic Load Balancing feature distributes incoming traffic between multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
n8’s website design and development company, Grrr, also aided the foundation by adjusting the site’s content management system and backend files for integration with Amazon S3 and the load balancing environment.
Jelle Spanjaard explains that, “The best part of using AWS was that the advantages which the platform has to offer were perfectly in line with our needs. We only needed the resource temporarily, and we didn’t have the financial resources to invest in additional hardware. Amazon Web Services ensured that the user experience on the site remained optimal at a minimum cost.”
Museum Night 2010 was a victory for n8. The foundation reports that the tickets were sold out in advance of the event, and 26,000 people visited the46 participating museums. The n8 website, backed by AWS, handled the increase in visitors without any problems. n8 is now looking forward to planning future events.
Jelle Spanjaard says, “For the next edition of the Amsterdam Museum Night, we are sure we would use Amazon Web Services again. It was a big success.”
Amazon Case Study: Amsterdam Museum Night Foundation
Date: 28-08-2013
