Yesterday we talked about whether Twitter really ever need to be reliable or not ... some said yes, others contend that it's not necessary.
It's been bugging me for awhile that something this popular ... and Twitter is so ... just keels over as often as it does.
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.
...
Alistair Croll has an interesting post where he argues that, for all intents and purposes, source code is irrelevant - the new valuable commodity is app tone.
... In the software-as-a-service world ... source code becomes irrelevant. If someone offered us the schematics to a telephone, we wouldn’t care. We don’t want to know how to make a phone. We want a dial tone. When it comes to IT, we want app tone.
As another way of saying people want apps to work, this could make sense. But irrelevant? That's just silly.
Robin Harris must have woken up grouchy today - he's dumping all over cloud hysteria on this fine Monday. After throwing the obligatory it's-all-marketing punch (the truth is that there IS a bunch of marketing, but there's also a bunch of real substance ... more on that in a minute), he gets down to business.
I am paraphrasing a bit, but here are his main points:
The only real key to Google's low cost structure is active cluster storage - if it's productized, anyone can be as cheap as Google (including your own datacenter).
Networks are still the thinnest resource in the computing landscape.
For the past year+ there have been many indicators that fundamental changes in the enterprise software development market are well underway. In particular, it sure seemed like the monolithic predominance of traditional JEE app servers was starting to break up.
Rod Johnson (springsource) has a pretty interesting post on Tomcat in the enterprise.
Recently we've begun running polls on SpringFramework.org, and some of the results are interesting. The question Which application server(s) do you use? produced the following results: BEA WebLogic (various versions) and JBoss AS shared first place among Java EE app servers on 16% each, with IBM WebSphere just behind on 15% and Glassfish putting in a creditable performance on 5%. But the easy winner was Tomcat, on 37%.
A month or so ago JP Rangaswami (confused of calcutta) mused on a challenge thrown out by Alan Kay - why isn't there a Moore's Law for software?
That question got me to thinking a bit, and as I promised in A Moore's Law for Software - Part One, here's a (very) modest proposal.
More on the Underlying Problem
As I have commented before, I am a big fan of Google's basic approach to scalable computing. There is much to like - Captain Enormous scale on commodity gear, rapid deployment of applications, and so on.
Yet it is by no means perfect.
In particular, there is a chronic level of failure in (at least) some of the flagship services that should not be acceptable in any modern day offering, least of all something which is a standard part of many people's workflows.
I wonder if there's a "rolling brownout" in google applications today?
Earlier in the morning google reader (generally a really decent app to have around) was hanging, going into eternal "loading" screens (see below).
Since all of my blog / news feeds go through google reader (for now), I decided to switch gears and go research something. Except that google search was down as well.
JP Rangaswami reflects on a recent talk by Alan Kay here. Things get interesting when Kay wonders aloud
