A few outages ago I wondered aloud whether Twitter was taking the whole business of failure somewhat casually (triggered by some comments Blaine Cook made at SXSW).

Blaine replied with some great points, including

For the record, saying that the press surrounding the downtimes was a plus was a joke. Downtime is never good, and you should do everything you can to avoid it. However, it's a misrepresentation to say that you can build something successful without any downtime.

...

Our foremost concern has been and will continue to be ensuring a stable platform; we've been working hard on numerous fronts, and that work is paying off. Bad press is horrible, and I'll be the first to take pleasure in never again seeing a "can Twitter scale?" story.

I believe him, and have quite a bit of empathy for the position he's in. (I have a friend who always used to talk about "high class problems" and "low class problems" ... Blaine and the other Tweetsters have a high class problem, but that's a post for another day)

There was one point that he made that I fundamentally disagree with, however:

Scaling is a commitment, and one you should only make once you're sure about an idea.

Yes it is most definitely a commitment, but it is my contention is that we're fast entering the time when it can be built-in from the beginning with little to no additional effort.

The Latest
This past weekend there's was a bunch more instability. Looks like they were putting in some more caching to take the heat off of the data tier, and things went wacky.

Now Robert Scoble is making the case that Twitter is leaving the door wide-open for Friendfeed ... (on Twitter of course, though my friend read it on Friendfeed!). Check out this short burst:

Michael Arrington thinks that the mass of the Twitter community makes this concern moot ... basically, he contends that Twitter no longer needs to be reliable.

The Days of the Free Pass on Reliability are Over
Basically, I think that 1) the days of web2 services getting a free pass on reliability are rapidly passing, and are probably already over, and 2) it's a shame to see stuff go whump when it's sooo unnecessary.

As for the days of the free pass being over, check out Dennis Howlett's (zdnet) comments on the most recent outage ... he's generally making the case that Twitter itself is really a POC for some better service yet to come, something more suitable to much larger markets.

Could that V1 service be Friendfeed? Maybe. Of course, it's too early to write-off Twitter entirely ... they've also hired their own scaling calvary (including the every-helpful Google expat!), so maybe they'll catch a second wind before the whole sector passes them by.

Build to Scale ... From the Beginning
Back to Blaine's comments. I can completely understand the notion of building a proof of concept ... besides, in the web 2.0 world it's long been accepted practice to throw something out there, and only build to scale when you figure out whether anyone cares.

That makes a lot of sense when building apps to scale is so freakin' hard. BUT ... easing that pain is precisely the point of stuff like our app fabric.

That is why it is my core contention that the ability to scale and be reliable, even for the most trivial services, is going to become the price of entry very soon (if it has not already become so).