Web 2.0 Demands More Availability

The current generation of Web 2.0 applications promises more than the consumer focused websites of yesteryear.

They promise constant connectivity wherever you are, instant communication and community. With these easy to access, almost always addictive to use applications, our expectations of service begin to change.

As users, we have come to expect that these services are available when we need them, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It doesn’t matter that we may not pay for them directly, they become part of our lives.

When they are suddenly unavailable, everyone seems to notice.

The blogosphere erupts when a popular web 2.0 application goes down. This includes when popular social networking sites fail, microblogging sites go down and infrastructure providers that many of the web 2.0 vendors rely upon for backend infrastructure stop providing services for days.

Entire month-long online conversations occur when an uptime monitoring service posts data showing that one quickly growing popular web 2.0 service had over 6 days of downtime in 2007.

This raises the stakes for organizations that live, breath and die by their online service delivery. Downtime is a difficult enough problem to manage by IT operations teams for traditional multi-tier business applications, it is even harder when you are dealing with cutting edge applications, fast growing user communities and the immense pressures of startup growth.

So what to do?

Don’t be seduced by the siren song that the current generation of enabling technologies have taken away the need for sound infrastructure best practice. Meeting customer expectations is hard work. Trying to meet it all the time is even harder.

A couple key approaches:

• Understand the cost of downtime to your organization. Don’t downplay the loss of reputation that can come from public outages. It can even affect your SEO.
• Architect for availability and scalability. The earlier you design for these factors, the less likely you will have problems.
• Changes are going to be the leading cause of downtime. While process always seems like a drag early on, it is worth the investment in maturing your change management approach.
• Make sure your IT operations group has a way to test changes, before deploying them into production.
• Budget enough time, resources and money to meet your users or customers expectations for availability.

It is important to keep a sense of balance. Joel Spolsky makes the important point that you have to find the right set of balance between availability and cost for your business and to meet your users expectations.

The expectations are higher. The challenge in the Web 2.0 world is to meet them.

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Filed Under: Change Management, Downtime, IT Operations