Why Santa is the best candidate to utilize geospatial data?
The work santa performs each year is enormous. Giving presents in all seven continents to over 2 billion children is truly incredible. In making this feat possible, Santa should definitely utilize geospatial data in several ways to make his work more efficient! According to Finnish folklore, Santa lives in Korvatunturi (located in Lapland), so we felt almost obligated to give Santa some geospatial advice!
Critical systems with zero downtime?
Santa’s job is quite unique. His logistics division is working full time only once per year: during Christmas. So during that specific day it is crucially important to have your data ready and available for heavy loads.
Let’s assume that Santa hosts all of his information about delivery addresses of children in open API. He really needs that data to be ready for all the elfs to check location data on the 24th of December. Availability must be 100% or otherwise millions of children will get their present delivered to wrong addresses or not delivered at all! During one second Santa’s elves and reindeers deliver ~25 463 presents. During the whole 24th total of 2.2 billion kids get their presents delivered to them.
Let’s say that the availability of that server drops a mere percentage, down to 99%. That would mean the loss of over 33 million presents! So in this case the downtime of 1% during that day really affects a lot of people immediately!
Google made a great summary (and sweet interactive games!) about Christmas to their “Santa tracker” webpage. During christmas you can actually track where Santa is moving in real time.
Integrations of supplier systems & standards
Making sure that your data is reliable and available might just not be enough always. You have to make sure that it is in an easily readable format. This is where standards jump in.
Santa should test before Christmas that all of his geospatial web services are validated for standards. Making sure that your geoserver is up to date with modern standards ensures that the data can be easily read by the users.
The standards can for example guide on what kind of metadata has to be included in the service description. Metadata in Santa’s geoserver could for example tell if the delivery location is hard to reach or how old the children are in that address.
Santa is definitely our dream customer
Updating and maintaining service that absolutely has to be 100% available and it has to handle huge loads isn’t a small feat. That is why Spatineo monitoring could solve many problems Santa faces with his geospatial web services. Performance testing could proof the services for heavy loads, and Monitor would enable Santa to get insights on his data: how did the elves use the data and what map tiles were used the most.
With this Christmas themed thought experiment, we wish happy holidays to all our readers! Hopefully your vacations go just a smooth as Santa’s geospatial web services with our assistance!
