Pokemon GO - Gotta Catch 'em All: A Study in IT at Scale

Talk about disruptive innovation. Pokemon GO, has put Nintendo back on the map as it has skyrocketed into the stratosphere of top mobile apps in just a week's time. The mobile game is a venture between Nintendo and Niantic, Inc - an independent entity in the Alphabet set of companies. It launched with much fanfare last week and generated critical mass and out-of-the-stratosphere velocity in terms of user adoption and game play. And here in lies the IT aspect.

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There were noticeable hiccups in Quality-of-Service (QoS) such that even though it was a Top Charts game, it had a 3.5 star rating in the Google Play Store. Essentially, the launch and overwhelming response created a situation where the elastic supply of cloud powered by Niantic's Alphabet parent company could not meet the demands of the rabidly active user base. An example was the experience of our very own James Honey, who was attempting to create an account for his youngest. He went through the web portal and created an account when it didn't timeout. It sent him an URL to verify his information to create his child's account, which also timed out. So he clicked on the customer support button, which sent an email but mean-time-to-resolution is 48-hours. Interestingly enough, he's still waiting for the verification and approval of the account for his child after 80+ hours from when he first started with the app download.

In closing, it circles back to things that IT pros already know all too well: (1) No matter how much planning and preparation goes into a production launch, it happens and IT pros have to remediate it efficiently and effectively; (2) Hybrid IT is reality as the app lifecycle is now spanning the developer's platform, running across distributed systems in the cloud(s), and is being consumed on someone's local mobile platform; and (3) the rate of change and scale of that change is ever growing over time and yet IT pros still have to deliver the CIO's SLA.

Do you think those three things are apropos? Let me know below in the comment section.

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