Game of Thrones vs. the Cloud

Game of Thrones is back! After nearly two years, the hit show returned for its eighth and final season Sunday night, and we can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

Who will stop the Night King? Who will end up on the Iron Throne? Which beloved characters are going to get turned into ice zombies? Will Clegane Bowl finally happen? Will we see Hot Pie again?

Yes, we’re suckers for the seven kingdoms. And if we are, we figure our Cloud Gurus probably are, too. So we took a look at our platform activity last night to see if there was any noticeable dip as people paused their studies to watch the season premiere.

Dip seems to be an understatement.

The Wall and the Cliff

HBO has described the streaming traffic pattern around Game of Thrones as “the wall”, and if that’s the case, we definitely saw “the cliff”!

Compared to average activity over the previous six Sundays, last night’s activity was down almost 11% overall, and dropped as much as 17% around the premiere’s airtime. In fact, it took around three hours for activity to start rebounding. This could be a lingering effect of streamers starting the episode a bit late, emotional recovery, and seeing to the usual nighttime routines before settling back in to learn more awesome cloud goodness.

People have been known to pause all kinds of online activities when a new episode of Game of Thrones airs, so it’s not a huge surprise to see our Cloud Gurus signing off for a few hours. Most of us did, too!

Fortunately, all of our courses, labs, quizzes, original series, and newly-launched learning paths are available 24/7. So go ahead and enjoy these final episodes - we’ll be here when the credits roll.

As a quick aside, if you’ve ever wondered how HBO manages to stream Game of Thrones without melting the entire internet, the story behind their Kubernetes deployment on AWS is a pretty interesting one.

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