The wealth of information on scaling is profound. Although, there was one lesson that I found to be the most interesting. This is that every web application is different. This is not to say that we cannot learn from others that have come before us, but we need to understand that every application has a wide variety of demanding requirements. This may include a special read/write mixture of database operations or an inability to effectively cache content. Because of these differences, developers must be extremely perceptive of their system. This means constant monitoring of the site’s trends.
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.
How a corporate entity reacts to crisis is important. Users expect official representatives to have frequent and forthright responses to crisis. Additionally, it is important that official representatives of the company do not make overly revealing or accusing remarks. It is rational for users to want 100% success rate in a company’s product or service. However, it may not be possible to deliver that promise. The reaction to service outages resulting from scaling must be handled in the same fashion.
Last year we saw plenty of downtime from Twitter. The response from Twitter was ‘growing pains.’ Since then, we have seen a large supply of posts from the development staff at Twitter describing issues and concepts related to their up-scaling efforts. Many users posted on the need for a push messaging system. Other users blame the foundation of Twitter’s problems squarely on Ruby on Rails’ supposed failure to scale. Twitter does not appear to want to change or remove Ruby on Rails any time soon. It is not my place to make a distinction on this topic.
The year 2008 has come to a close. Its time for blogs to tally the successes and failures of web sites and their services. It is another year of product launches and shaky web service consumer confidence. The list of failed launches is always quite high. Inadequate testing and poor anticipation of demand lead to the always popular server flood on opening day.