95% Uptime
As we progress further into the whole Web 2.0 concept, an increasing level of importance will be placed on uptime. I thought the best way to start was to define "uptime". Google offers this:
"The amount of time a web site is available. The industry benchmark at this point in time for availability is 99.99%." - Google Definition
The question that nags me a little, is does 99.99% make a good benchmark? I don’t believe it does; it’s more of a stretch target. Is it feasible that applications running on servers, which are sometimes extremely far away from their users, are up for nearly 100% of the time?
I still feel the idea of executing full-blown applications over the Web is still a relatively "new" concept. If the industry benchmark is currently 99.9%, how long until it reaches 100%? It can’t be too far off…and when it hits, some SLA’s are going to cause CEO’s to lose many nights of sleep.
There is an article on C|Net about how Salesforce.com suffered its longest outage ever. It was for 7.5 hours over the course of a day, so almost an entire business day. Will this affect SLA’s? Not if Salesforce.com is up from now until the end of the month with only regularly scheduled outages. So, therein lies the ability to achieve this seemingly impossible 99.9% dream. It’s based on aggregate numbers. There are 8,760 hours in a year. To go above an beyond a common, "industry standard" SLA, a Web-based service would have to be up for the entire 8,760 hours. However, I’d say it’s a good guess to assume that most will schedule roughly 2-3 hours per month (in non-peak times) to do maintenance. That leaves 8,736 hours in a year. If we knock that back to 99.9% of the time, we’re left with 8,727.264 hours.
How does this work for Salesforce.com? Well, they proclaim on their site they live up to the 99.9% figure:
"In the year 2000, salesforce.com achieved a practically unheard-of 99.9% scheduled uptime level." - Salesforce.com Quote
Let’s work with that 7.5 hour outage they had today. If we remove that from the 8,727.264 figure, we’re left with 8,719.764. We’re left with 99.914% uptime, which is still pretty damn awesome in my book.
If you are still with me, you are a saint in my book. Thank you. Do I have a point? I hope so. It is simply that I don’t want exciting Web-based services like:
Get hit in the press when they go down. It can be argued both ways: it spins a buying decision positively, or it spins a buying decision negatively. Look at Salesforce.com. They have an awesome reputation in the Industry and are used by a ton of people everyday. Did it piss folks off they couldn’t get access to their leads and other data for over 7 hours? Of course. Does it mean that a business is going to make a huge investment and switch over to another service? I don’t think so. At the end of the day, it will only help a company like Salesforce.com as it brings generates added buzz.
What if Basecamp started getting stories written about the downtime it was experiencing because of a good thing (increased business / usage / etc…), and they lose hard-earned revenue because of it? This is why I think having 99.99% as the industry target is somewhat of a lark. It should be more like 95%, since that’s when the actual hours start to show impact. It would take an outage of over 700 hours to knock Salesforce.com down to that level. Since 99.99% will always just "be there", floating in the consumer’s collective conscience, it’s easy to set 95% as more realistic. If a company hovers between 97 and 98%, that’s awesome. If they are running down around 80%, you know there may be some issues to look into further.
At the end of the day, there are much more important things that a business can be judged on other than its uptime. Look, hardware is awesome nowadays, the coding is getting better by the line, and the means in which it can be delivered and charged for are increasingly complex and creative. The right fit needs to be the focus and less on "99.99%". That’s just my opinion - but I don’t really know much.
Still Exciting
The Web is still exciting. I’m involved at the core of an e-commerce company, and love every second of it. There are still a ton of places that can be leveraged and built upon. Hell, I still love coding some things myself, and have yet to even touch my first e-commerce application. But, I can say this: it’s coming. I feel the urge stronger more each day to develop something that deals with electronic commerce, users, and all of that really fun and exciting stuff.
There are a ton of technologies that are very, very cool and have yet to be used in a ton of areas. One such example includes Windows Forms. I wish I was more of a Microsoft guy than a PHP guy just for this stuff alone. However, there are a ton of things that Google is doing with AJAX that really gets me going. I’ve explored this before with PHP / JavaScript / XML, but have yet to get really deeply into it.
Away from my full-time job, I’m working on a ticket-based support app that I’m calling 24×7. It’s going to be pretty simple in its first iteration, just e-mail pulls, customer recognition, tying e-mail responses to a single ticket, etc… Nothing too serious. However, I hope that I get to use these technologies that I find really awesome more and more.
Plus, I know that I’ll be able to track things more effectively for nothing. Congrats, Google. You’ve done it again with Analytics — free, enterprise-grade analytics based on the coolness that is Urchin. Wow. I continue to love this stuff more and more each day.
Yahoo! & E-mail
I’ll give Yahoo! some credit. They really are trying hard to compete with Google, that’s for damned sure. Take a quick read through this article. I’ll still be here, I promise.
OK? Cool.
You know it’s funny when the unofficial Yahoo! blog writes:
"the first serious challenge to Gmail since Google forced competitors to unsuccessfully chase its ever-expanding storage capacity."
When you are attempting to justify your products features and functionality against your top competitor’s, you are definitely in a tough spot. Yahoo! didn’t have the privilege of releasing a statement saying:
"Unprecedented Web-based e-mail storage."
Google had that fun. And they are still going strong. Check out the Gmail home page. They have that active disk space counter running there. I’ve seen it directly correlate to the space in my Gmail account — that’s awesome, and in my opinion, a genius blend of marketing and functionality.
Sadly, I think the only way Yahoo! is going to make a splash in the Web-based e-mail market now is to be the first to offer 1 terabyte of storage. That would be cool, and with the terabyte coming of age, I’m sure Google would step up the plate and offer 2-4 terabytes of space for each user. Imagine that, huh? The more space we get, the more crap we all find to fill it with. It’s like money — usually, the more you have, the more you spend.
Sophistication
Does anyone remember the days when it was considered revolutionary to think that one day you’d be able to connect CGI-based applications to a database? I only recollect this through friends who were old enough at the time to comprehend such a thing; I was still a little hooligan back then with dreams of being a rock star, not a Product Manager, VP, or CEO.
I know it’s a tad cliche to blog on things that are taken for granted nowadays, but I just ran into something while changing my Google AdWord config for this site. I have been doing a little cost-effective experiment since 2005-08-21, and so far it’s paid off. But check this out:
Fans of the movie Van Wilder will recognize this line immediatlely. People who haven’t seen the movie won’t, but it gives them a good excuse to check out a great American classic.
I was trying to combine my display URL with the last line of the ad to see if I could cicumvent Google’s 35-character line limit. I did so by putting a semi-colon after "…Barry White". As shown in the image, the app caught the attempted trick and barfed out an error. Cool. Second, I figured since the Display URL was only for show, I could tack regular English in there — nope, second barf. Even cooler.
This is a great example of the Product Manager, or whomever design this feature, doing their job and it’s inspiring. While I could imagine a ton of people have tried to do this, leading Google to put catches in place for it, I doubt it was something that was in the initial version of the service. Nevertheless, it’s a great lesson for first-time / early product builders — the devil (or God) is in the details.
Again, nice work Google.
Google Talk
Google is taking over my desktop.
And I’m not going to lie; I like it.
First they release Desktop 2. Now, I love Desktop Search. It’s freakin’ amazing. They have enhanced it with this cool sidebar that, I already kinda know will grow old, but for the time being, it’s killer. I still have to figure out how it’s indexing e-mails though, because there is one Outlook data file that I set it not to index, and that’s how I believe it’s done. I cleared out all the e-mails in the index cache from that file, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed about it working properly.
Google Talk is also SO cool. I can’t wait until there are more people using this beast. My girlfriend and I tried it out briefly this evening, and it seems really cool. To be honest, I’ve never really liked Skype. I can’t say why, but it could be their branding - it never really struck a chord with me. Google, on the other hand, really piques my interest by keeping things extremely simple. Plus, I know they’ll get things right because they remember one key thing: god is in the details.
Thanks for delivering that idea today to me, Ludwig. I appreciate it more than you’ll ever know.
