Technology

What the Netflix Holiday Outage Means, And What We Can Learn

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This holiday, Santa delivered us a big stocking full of internet stability issues.

Christmas was the time to sit down with family, turn on the television, and wonder why the hell Netflix wasn’t working.  You can see a timeline at GigaOm, and the culprit was clearly Amazon Web Services, whose “Elastic Load Balancing Service” failed to live up to any of the four words in its title.  Heroku and others suffered outages, but except for a sporadic report or two, Amazon’s on video service apparently ran fine.

I can’t begin to imagine the discussions between Netflix and Amazon over this one, at least I can’t begin to imagine one that doesn’t start with the words “What the hell . . .” and goes downhill from there.

(Steam had it’s own outage, but that was kind of overshadowed by this doozy).

It’s not the first time an Amazon outage has a huge impact.  As a person up to his armpits in IT, living in Silicon Valley, I get to hear about Amazon outages more than most.  Even if I don’t want to, which is frankly a lot, considering I’m the Accidental Therapist so often.

So it’s not the first time, but it’s a big outage, on a big day, with a big client, for a service that’s involved in a lot of major websites.  Time for us pro geeks to put on our Big Geek shoes and sort out what this means for us.

1) Beyond any impacts to Amazon, Netflix, etc. this is a serious wake-up call for stability over the holidays (and that includes Steam).  The fact this even could happen in this day and age is a sign that some people don’t take holiday stability seriously enough, and they bloody well should.  This was the time people would be watching movies, everyone is on the internet or is about to get on with their latest gizmo gift.  An outage should be unthinkable.

Of course we had to think of it because it happened.  So anyone working in anything remotely related to IT your takeaway is to use this incident to promote good stability and holiday policies.  And to scare the crap out of anyone not taking them seriously.

Some people have to draw the short straws and keep monitoring systems in case they have to apply the well-tested emergency plans that you doubtlessly have carefully put together.

2) Amazon has taken a black eye for this in the IT crowd, and there’s often grumbling when AWS issues happen as so many people use AWS.  Their competitors can (and probably will) step up to the plate and try to wrest service and clients away from them – and they have a pretty wide range of competitors:

If Netflix publicly moves away from Amazon, or any other big name, it’d be a big win for whoever gets the contract (and a place to send your resume).  It would also be tough on Amazon.

If you work in IT, this may well come up: “Do we use Amazon?” and you may well need to answer.

3) It’s painfully clear that as we move to a more connected world that we’re back to the old “mainframe is down” problem of terminal computing.  With more things in the cloud, we’re discovering that doesn’t mean jack unless we can get to the bloody thing.  If you work in software, please, remember this, it may save your customers stress – and you your job.

4) Netflix is not going to be held entirely blameless here because not everyone angry over the outage are geeks like us.  It’s going to be common users who aren’t happy.  Netflix has to make some tough decisions about what to do – and they cannot have any repeats of this.

5) Lost in all of this is how the Netflix competitors are handling this.  See I don’t know what, if anything, Redbox, etc. are doing.  Makes you wonder, and makes you wonder if you should look into them and see if there’s any opportunities.  I also see some potential marketing opportunities if people want to take advantage of Netflix (and further anger their competitor).

6) This is a teachable moment when we can remind people not as buried in tech as we are how complex, and at times unreliable technology is.  May be a good idea for your company, clients, or family to get a quick lesson in how things don’t work.

We can’t have outages like this anymore, not as we rely on these systems, and not at critical times.  If we’re going to live in this connected world, then it’s got to work like the disconnected world – my DVD doesn’t vanish because of an east coast server outage.  People have expectations.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

 

 

 

Christmas With The Service Outage

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Remember Christmases when the outages of Netflix or Steam wouldn’t have been factors?  It was only a few years ago when it wouldn’t have been as noticed or even regarded.

Of course now we can add large-scale technical glitches to other holiday annoyances like non-working Christmas lights, traffic, closed businesses, and crowded airports.  I wonder how used we’ll get to them.

I imagine not very.  We expect instant service from our technology, even if we usually accept much less.  However I imagine Netflix and Valve know this and will work to correct things for next year.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

How To Cope With the Usual “Be Like This Startup” Comment

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So lately I got laid off from my latest startup.  As you can guess, I’m kinda getting over the startup thing.  As I look back on my startup experiences and those of friends, one thing comes to mind repeatedly.

Comparisons.

You cannot easily measure how tired I am of hearing the stories about “what Facebook does.”  I’m only slightly more tired of that all the other “we should be like X startup” comments I’ve tolerated over the years.  You can imagine how tired I am; you probably are yourself.

We’re tired of “be like X.”

Let’s be brutally honest here: these comparisons are usually ridiculous.  The startup or company you’re at is not Facebook.  These little “be like X” invocations are tossed around casually and they’re ridiculous and dangerous because they ignore harsh realities and serious differences.

So, when confronted with them?  Here’s my checklist to see if the comparison is actually relevant – and how i respond.

Is the startup being invoked in the same business as your company?  If not then the comparison is already suspect.  If the company being admired isn’t in a business yours can relate to, the comparison may be of no value.  Of course there may be another valuable comparison.

Is the startup being invoked using any similar technologies?  If the much-admired startup you’re being harassed about isn’t using any similar technologies, then really, there’s not much to say.  If there’s no solid underpinnings you share in common, what’s similar?  Well, OK there may be one thing . . .

Is the startup being invoked using any similar business processes?  This can actually be relevant because business processes like SCRUM, Kanban, etc. can be remapped more easily than technical ones.  However, people still have to demonstrate that the processes can be imported because . . .

Is the startup being invoked one that has any similarities to your business at all?  If not, then why the hell is anyone comparing it?  Similar supply chains?  Something?  Really?  If there isn’t anything, then there’s no comparison.  But finally . . .

Is the startup being invoked one that’s gonna be around and have the future you want?  Even if it’s actually good advice in the short term, in the long term is the latest popular startup someone you’re going to want to be like in the next year or two?  If not, then the comparison isn’t really a valid one.

Personally and professionally, I’m very tired of the “be like the latest startup” trend.  I’m sure you are too.  So here’s a bit of ammo next time you have to wade into the war of ideas.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.