SaaS
Web Services
What are the repercussions of a Software as a Service outage? Obviously, there is significant monetary value being lost during these periods. Customers may not make purchases on eCommerce sites or could simply take their business to a competitor. The basic sources of downtime are attack, overload, no power, bugs, and breakdowns.
Produced as a load testing utility, Reality Load XF from Gomez has a full range of features designed to create realistic testing conditions that truly prepare a web application for the rigors of the live production environment. With Reality Load XF, engineers can prototype new functionality without the fear of causing a breakdown in application reliability.
Google Apps (previously Apps for your Domain or AFYD) and Gmail has been down for some users over the past day. We have not been affected, but apparently some are having an extended outage with 502 errors.
I am curious about whether the affected users are “Premier” customers who have paid for the service. Also, the reports say that the gmail web client is down, but they do not say anything about IMAP, POP, SMTP services are working.
Some prominent services have experienced problems in the past week or so.
Infoweek article by David Berlind
LinkedIn was down yesterday, adding to the list of recent failures in web services. The company reported this to be related to a recent update and higher than normal usage. The recently added features are similar to those offered by Facebook and Twitter which allow users to send info about what they are currently doing to their connections.
Disclosure: We like LinkedIn. For business networking in the US, I don’t think there is a better service.