Case Study: NOAA keeps citizens informed during eclipses and hurricanes with Amazon Web Services (Amazon CloudFront)

NOAA Keeps Citizens Informed of Eclipses and Hurricanes with Amazon CloudFront

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) must deliver reliable, always-on weather and climate information to citizens, emergency managers, and decision makers. In 2017 a historic solar eclipse and back-to-back hurricanes threatened to overwhelm NOAA’s web infrastructure—traffic was expected to spike within days and the agency could not scale its on‑premises systems quickly enough.

NOAA deployed Amazon CloudFront, a global CDN, to accelerate and reliably deliver content. The service was in place for the hurricanes and Hurricanes.gov handled four times its previous peak traffic with more than one billion requests in a single day, serving pages faster, keeping users informed longer, and providing low-cost, scalable capacity NOAA plans to reuse for future storm coverage.

NOAA

Cameron Shelton

Director of Service Delivery