The Weather Company stays up and running with IBM Cloud.

Case study: “Keeping people safer in extreme weather”

Weather websites like weather.com® and wunderground.com® face an exponentially harder scalability challenge, and their performance during periods of intense demand can literally spell the difference between life and death.

Even on a day of normal weather, the level of demand on the two sites — owned and operated by The Weather Company, an IBM Business — can verge on the extraordinary. Consider this: on an average day, The Weather Company processes over 400 TB of data (enough to fill 75 million 400-page novels in printed form), delivers more than 50 billion requests for weather information, and produces 25 billion forecasts. And when severe weather strikes, that demand can shift dramatically, with page views surging from an average of 30 million to 150 million per day.

Highlights

Chris Hill, Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer for IBM Watson Advertising and Weather had the following to say:

“IBM Cloud is the perfect engine to power the world’s largest weather websites and deliver the fastest, most accurate weather insight to millions of users around the globe.”

“With the 2019 acquisition of Red Hat by IBM, we’ve made the decision to use OpenShift as a key technology for our business. We have migrated the weather.com consumer website into it now, which enables us to leverage our investment in implementing IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, the managed component of OpenShift on IBM Cloud.”

“Our products are all built on open source technologies, allowing us to focus on building products that our customers love, rather than on building support components from scratch. Using open source components ensures that they can leverage the scale of open source communities to keep them up to date.”

“The most important thing is that we can continue to scale our platforms to help people stay safe when extreme weather hits.”

Additionally, The Weather Company is rolling out a new version of its History on Demand – Conditions offering that relies heavily upon the IBM Cloud SQL Query and IBM Cloud Object Storage solutions. Accessible through a web API, the History on Demand – Conditions application gives users access to global, high-resolution datasets of past weather conditions. The Weather Company collects weather data across the globe at the rate of 34 million records per hour.

Read the full case study to learn more: “Keeping people safer in extreme weather”