A Central Dispatch

Central Dispatch

The Central Dispatch’s simple website design, while not beautiful by any means, has made it easy for visitors to find the information they need quickly and conveniently. They understand that the best website design is not a design, but a design that people can understand and feel comfortable interacting with. Central Dispatch also focuses on usability. Their homepage informs visitors about their services and how they can get in contact with them. Users can also order an ambulance or one of their available vehicles.

Dispatch

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I found this app at the beginning of the golf season. It has saved me money overall, as the "Hot Deals" are hard to beat. I've paid as little as $14 to as much as $54 for a hot deal, depending on how long I hold out to book my round. I, like many, share the frustration of having to book 3 days out to use your "Bonus". Sometimes I don't know if I'll be able to play until the day before, and by then it's too late to use it. I understand GolfNow wants to make as much money on the tee time as they can, but you are also making money from the course that uses the system. I only have 3 courses in my area that use it, one of them being my "Home" course, so for that I am lucky.

That led the team on a quest to find the right orchestration system for the company's needs. Sheriff says the first few options they tried were either too heavy or "didn't feel quite right." In late summer 2015, they discovered the just-released Kubernetes, which Sheriff immediately liked for its ease of use. "We did another proof of concept," he says, "and Kubernetes won because of the fact that the community backing was there, built on top of what Google had already done." (Source: kubernetes.io)

Team

After three weeks of monitoring to make sure everything was running stable, the team migrated the rest of the application into their Kubernetes cluster. And the impact was immediate: On top of cutting monthly costs by a large percentage, says Sheriff, "Running at the same capacity and during our peak time, we were able to horizontally grow. Since we were using our VMs more efficiently with containers, we didn't have to pay extra money at all."

And long-term, Sheriff has an even bigger goal for getting more people into the Kubernetes fold. "We're actually trying to make this platform generic enough so that any of our sister companies can use it if they wish," he says. "Most definitely I think it can be used as a model. I think the way we migrated into it, the way we built it out, are all ways that I think other companies can learn from, and should not be afraid of." (Source: kubernetes.io)

Service

This weekend I had a tee time registered at a local golf course at 830 am…. Are area was hit by very bad storms the night before over 5 inches of rain in 30 hours governor actually issued a state of emergency for the day freeways were flooded higher then car roofs. I proceeded to wake up at 730 am and call the course and received no answer. I assumed with all the rain and no answer course was obviously closed. At some point the course opened that day and told Golfnow to bill me for a no show or cancellation. I’m an avid golfer never once missed a tee time or forgot to cancel a tee time it’s the respectful thing to do. But no answer at course and 5 inches of rain I thought seemed obvious. Needless to say I contacted customer service talked to employee who said the course said charge was valid and could do nothing about it. I asked to speak to a manager after about 20 minutes on hold they came back and said he would call within 24 hours it’s going on about 4 days. No attempt at calling me back at all. (Source:

kubernetes.io)A top-performing business within the NBC Sports Group, GolfNow is a technology and services company with the largest tee time marketplace in the world. GolfNow serves 5 million active golfers across 10 different products. In recent years, the business had grown so fast that the infrastructure supporting their giant monolithic application (written in C#.NET and backed by SQL Server database management system) could not keep up. "With our growth we obviously needed to expand our infrastructure, and we kept growing vertically rather than horizontally," says Sheriff, GolfNow's Director, Architecture. "Our costs were growing exponentially. And on top of that, we had to build a Disaster Recovery (DR) environment, which then meant we'd have to copy exactly what we had in our original data center to another data center that was just the standby. We were basically wasting money and doubling the cost of our infrastructure." (Source: