When you get the opportunity to support one of the UK’s most prestigious charities, it’s not a responsibility to be taken lightly. Held every two years, Red Nose Day is all about the public’s power to make the world a better place, simply by having a great time. In 2017, we at Pivotal are proud to host Comic Relief’s donation-processing platform on our flagship open-source Cloud Foundry product, as the charity strives to break the fundraising record of its marquee event. Operating on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, our technology will form the infrastructure collecting donations processed online.
When you’re hitting potential peaks of between two and three hundred donations every second, there is a lot riding on the underlying system. In fact, the majority of Comic Relief’s two-year fundraising cycle is concentrated during a specific seven-hour period, when the eyes of the nation are glued to their television screens. Given the huge peaks in donations throughout Red Nose Day, Pivotal Cloud Foundry was chosen as Comic Relief’s scalable, resilient backbone, agile enough to cope with these variations in demand.
So narrow is the primary window of opportunity, that performance failures or bottlenecks could impact Comic Relief’s donation process. In particular, obstructions to the flow and processing of payments could result in two years of lost opportunities to fund the initiatives of charities that rely on donations. Since December, Pivotal engineers have been carrying out weekly capacity tests in territories across the globe, to ensure the donation platform is prepared to combat a range of scenarios and fully capitalise on Comic Relief’s landmark event.
Pivotal’s technology platform provides the reliable base from which we can leap to another record-breaking year of fundraising.
—Zenon Hannick, CTO, Comic Relief
“We are proud to be supporting the fantastic work of a charity as admired as Comic Relief,” commented Colin Humphreys, Vice President, CTO of Cloud at Pivotal. “Being selected to work alongside the organisation is testament to the flexibility of our Cloud Foundry technology, a platform capable of adapting to the significant fluctuations in donation activity and maintaining the reputation of one of the UK’s most admired charities when it matters most.”
“With such a concentrated fundraising window, collaborating with Pivotal has allowed us to manage the huge spikes in demand we experience,” added Zenon Hannick, CTO, Comic Relief. “Thousands of charities rely on the donations we collect. Pivotal’s technology platform provides the reliable base from which we can leap to another record-breaking year of fundraising.”
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