Anil Madhavapeddy

Paper on the NASA Mars Polar Lander website architecture / Jul 2000

Although the Mars Polar Lander ended up crashing, the website itself was one of the busiest websites in the world at the time during the approach to the landing. I was the person handling the website architecture and the amazing webmaster@mars.nasa.gov account at the time. I worked closely with Sun and NetApp and wrote up a technical report on how the Mars Polar Lander website acceleration architecture worked. The report detailed our distributed web site architecture using caching and load balancing to handle massive traffic spikes, with lessons applicable to designing scalable internet services. It was an early real-world example of content distribution networks and cacheability design principles.