Esher College use Microsoft Azure to deliver Online Applications process
This week Parabola finished delivering a new Online Applications solution for Esher College, successfully handling over 1000 submissions from students hoping to attend the college in 2011.
Esher College decided to move the applications process online last year, streamlining their existing manual processes for greater efficiency and in an attempt to make the application process fairer. Other Colleges have made this move to an online system, but Esher College had the added challenge of supporting their existing 'first come, first served' admissions policy. Under the former system, many applications were hand-delivered, indeed, in June 2009 the total number of allocated places were filled in this way. The challenge for Parabola was therefore to design and build a high quality online system capable of coping with an extremely high demand within the first few minutes.
The whole application process required three stages; registration, 'completion and declaration' and finally, submission. Only at the submission stage was timing critical for the applicants, with Esher admitting a finite number of all applications received by their database.
The solution designed by Parabola took advantage of the new Cloud Computing capabilities of the Microsoft Azure platform. One advantage of this was to allow Esher to 'lease' a large amount of server capacity during periods when the peak load was anticipated. Leasing is an economical way of covering the short period of maximum demand because buying sufficient hardware would have resulted in huge unused capacity.
Parabola load tested and decided on 8 servers via Windows Azure for the first day of the application submission, with only a single server required to process the applications all the rest of the time.
Submissions opened online at 7 a.m. on Monday 20th September, and as expected, the high load appeared in the first few seconds and the Azure capacity was able to support the system.
Esher College were pleased to see the system operate as planned. David Lloyd, ILT Development Director at Esher College added: "Parabola have once again delivered a high quality solution and were able to make use of the latest Cloud Computing technology to solve this particular demand problem."