How Nintendo taught EB Games to get the most out of AWS

The new public cloud environment was soon put to the test when pre-orders opened up for the Mini NES, Nintendo's revamped Nintendo Entertainment System, originally released in 1983.

When online orders opened up on 14 November, the demand was so high that EB's online store crashed twice, leaving some customers missing out.

According to a company statement, the website typically receives about 500,000 page views on any given Tuesday. When the Mini NES came online, the website hit 7.5 million.

It wasn't just EB that was crippled by the demand. Amazon's own store crashed as well following reports of low supplies of the console.

Clarke said there was no possible way to account for the demand for the Mini NES.

"In co-lo, we would have had no hope dealing with the Mini NES. The capacity would be nowhere near possible. It's just a new paradigm where you need to fully embrace it to work in this ecosystem. The thing is, you're never going to have enough capacity."

Clarke said that the IT team took away lessons from the Mini NES incident to prepare for its busiest day of the year, Mad Monday.

"We found that the efficiencies in AWS helped us immensely in Mad Monday. We cut down average load time to 2.2 seconds," he said.

"The reason we did so well on Mad Monday was after the Mini NES, we used a load testing product, RedLine Load Testing, in Amazon and had a much bigger focus on website performance. We had to reset what was considered normal."