CrowdHandler Provides Seamless Virtual Waiting Rooms with Akamai

CrowdHandler is an online waiting room and virtual queuing service that protects websites during periods of heavy traffic, prevents servers from becoming overwhelmed, and allows customers to continue to process their transactions with confidence. It is trusted by the entertainment and sports industries, Fortune 500 companies, government institutions, and  online retailers all over the world. We’re delighted that this innovative company has chosen to work with us to deliver the experience their clients have come to trust.

Since CrowdHandler added Akamai to its list of integrations, it’s been easy for customers to install and implement a CrowdHandler waiting room. Akamai EdgeWorkers enables developers to create and deploy microservices across more than 250,000 edge servers around the globe. 

CrowdHandler’s Akamai-powered waiting room offers extra security and protection because the waiting room check runs at Akamai's edge, rather than in the browser, so any opportunity for tech savvy users to bypass it is removed. And, because the integration uses Akamai EdgeWorkers, development teams will not need to modify their application at all. 

Seamless integration

The CrowdHandler waiting room does not compromise or disrupt Akamai's ability to cache pages in any way. That’s because the CrowdHandler waiting room is running in front of the cache — in other words, the waiting room check and subsequent user redirect happens before the page is retrieved from the cache, not the server. 

Because the CrowdHandler waiting room configuration and user status is maintained within Akamai, the EdgeWorkers code adds an average of just 20 milliseconds to page load times. By using this “light touch” integration, rather than making multiple API calls, CrowdHandler ensures that their customers will not experience any page load delays.

Collaborating with Akamai

Speaking about their collaboration with Akamai, the CrowdHandler team shared:

Luke Owen, CTO, CrowdHandler

“Akamai imposes some pretty strict limits on execution time — but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Akamai's mission is to speed up their customer’s sites and under high demand every millisecond counts. Compared to some of the simpler examples in the EdgeWorkers documentation, we had a lot of work to cram into a tiny execution time. But we’re really happy with the results. We can check every user’s request to every page, to see if they should actually be in a waiting room, queuing for access to that resource. That check adds just 20 milliseconds to the load time for each page. That’s a five-fold improvement over some of our previous methods, and we wouldn’t have gotten there without Akamai leading us to rethink our approach.”

Jake Grimley, CEO, CrowdHandler

“We knew we needed to work with Akamai, because our product is for people who are popular online, and that’s Akamai’s core market. But we never thought Akamai was the type of company that a smaller tech startup like ours could engage with easily. It turned out that getting on board was a breeze, and for our developers it’s been possible to get direct, knowledgeable support from people who know the platform intimately. Since playing with the EdgeWorkers product, Akamai have acquired Linode, and we’re keen to see where they go with edge computing in general.”

Find out more about CrowdHandler here.