has_many :thoughts: Tag rant

The trouble with services, part 2

Colin A. Bartlett — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:45:00 -0500

In our last installment, during a Basecamp outage, I concluded that occasional service interruptions didn’t dissuade me from using hosted services. I’d rather have someone else running around working to fix the problem then me.

In today’s installment all of Amazon web services are in-operational.

That means all of Web 2.5, as Justin calls it, is down for the count. I first noticed this on WIRE. After I got over the initial panic of not being able to see a picture of Randy’s Cherios cereal bar, I realized Basecamp, Twitter, and a ton more all depend on Amazon.

This brings us back to the debate over hosted services. And I think there’s one component I missed last time: the number cogs in a wheel. It seems like having services that depend on services that depend on services can bring in additional complexity. So now, not only does using Basecamp require all their servers to be running but it also requires the Amazon servers to be running.

We have debated using Amazon S3 and EC2 here on a few projects recently. Andy asked me straight up not two weeks ago how much I trusted Amazon for reliability. I replied: “100%. They’re Amazon.” I suppose I should have remembered that being a big ass corporation doesn’t make them exempt from downtime. And if one truly needs 100% uptime, one needs to use multiple services with redundant backups. That’s what we all thought we were getting with Amazon web services. I guess not.

The trouble with services

Colin A. Bartlett — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:18:00 -0500

I’ve been evaluating services from 37signals recently including Basecamp and Highrise. We’ve been long overdue for an upgrade to our internal job and contact management systems and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try what many people say are some great apps.

So far, I’ve been generally happy. I still have hurdles to get over in my mind such as having to pay each and every month, not having my data under my own control, and not being able to instantly add whatever feature we want. But in general, I’ve been pleased.

But at this moment, I can’t seem to get to any 37signals product. Perhaps they’re having some kind of technical trouble. I’ve tried navigating to their services from several points on the interwebs and: nothing.

And so, I’m confronted by the other reality of hosted services: Outages are out of my control. Which, of course, has both benefits and disadvantages.

Benefit: I’m not running around like mad trying to get Basecamp up and running right now.
Disadvantage: I’m powerless to do anything.

Even if I was using a home-built, in-house app, somewhere down the line someone else is still responsible. For the datacenter, for the bandwidth, for the hardware, etc. And so I think that the benefit of not being the one up shits creek without a paddle outweighs the disadvantage of having to sit on my thumbs right now.

But, it’s still frustrating as hell.

Philadelphia not very wired

Colin A. Bartlett — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:54:00 -0500

How sad it is indeed to not see Philadelphia make the top 10 or even top 30 most wired cities according to Forbes.

When Philadelphia unveiled its Wireless Philadelphia plan so many years ago I was thrilled. I was proud to be a resident and excited to be a business owner in the Philadelphia area. But the project has been dogged by problems and delays. And I’ve yet to be able to get wireless internet at my own house and only rarely been able to obtain it in a few locations even in the downtown area.

Please, Philly, get your act together, get this network built out and let’s all start enjoying the benefits of ubiquitous wireless internet access.

PS: What marketing asshole high on the thought of increased ad-impressions decided to split this list into 30 separate pages in a “slideshow” fashion. Give me a break.