Performance and Availability

...so you launch a service that allows users to post their deepest, most important and most private (in a public-sharing-kinda way) thoughts, feelings, dreams and .. .stuff. So what?

Do you, as a "service provider" who provides your service for free (click here for a "Premium Account") have any obligation towards stability, performance, availability, reliability?

Availability

So the service gets overwhelmed, either by legitimate use or by DDoS attack (as has been the case with twitter) - so what? Does the availability of the service matter?

To explore this further, you need to look at what the service is being used for, what other services rely on (and assume) its' availability. Building another service on top of this service introduces a single point of failure when the underlying service is not responding.

Performance 1

When designing tables and data retreival requests, optomisation becomes really important. Shaving a few milliseconds off a process may seem trivial until you realise that process may be being performed thousands of times a second. Composing a page that relies on multiple retrieval requests is fraught with issues - these are the eternal nightmares of database designers - number of tables vs redundancy vs number of nulls.

Performance 2

Hosting services requires bandwidth - bandwidth costs money and requires infrastructure that is designed, maintained and zippy. Download speeds _used_ to be the measure of a service but with the advent of "Web2.0" services, interaction and hence upload+download are necessary components of a capable service.

How do you measure required bandwidth? How do you project likely growth and plan accordingly? How do you scale if your userbase takes off? All interesting questions.

As the host of a service, you have only fleeting control over the ROUTE users will take to get to you, or the route your data will take to the user. The miracle that is the internet is in control of much of what is perceived as "performance" of an online service. Internet service providrs, international routing and transport magic can conspire against even the best plans.

...help me out here please, got any good issues that need discussion or points of view you want to share? Share and Enjoy