Yesterday, several news and social networking web sites experienced significant performance melt downs on the rumor and final validation of Michael Jackson’s unexpected death. As millions of MJ’s fans flocked to sites like Twitter, Facebook, CNN, and the LA Times looking for verification, the load exceeded the capacity of these sites and caused each to slow to a crawl or, in at least one case, actually crash. Performance anxiety makes for some great headlines in the tech world, but what if it’s your own web site that crashes under unexpected load.   TaTa Motors spent years developing a low cost, efficient car, and then spent millions of dollars on an ad campaign to launch it.  Unfortunately no one tested their website.  Over 40 Million people hit the website as the marketing campaign launched, yet only 1,000 potential customer got in, as their site crashed under the unexpected demand.

The fact is,  the tech world has been masking a dirty little secret for years: that we rarely  do any form of Load or Performance testing of our web applications and sites before they are launched.   The reason …cost!    It has become virtually impossible for even the largest corporations to afford hardware to simulate real world web traffic, let alone unexpected loads.  So what are leading edge customer service companies doing differently to preserve their web sites performance?  After all, our web sites have become the single most important interface we have to our prospects and customers. Which means if your site is down, you are probably losing money.

One company, Intuit, having experienced several well documented website Performance issues in the past decided to do things differently this year.   They started by looking to the Clouds (Cloud Computing) to find a creative solution to their past Performance issues.  They found their solution with SOASTA’s CloudTest an On-Demand service that met all its needs. Intuit chose SOASTA because its CloudTest On-Demand service provided  the ability to quickly and precisely replicate anticipated user load for the TurboTax site; without having to buy thousands of expensive servers and have them installed inside their test labs.

Each Tax season, millions of Tax Filers flock to TurboTax to file on-line. This past year a record 18.76 million taxpayers used TurboTax, up 11 percent from 2008. And, Intuit took proactive measures to uncover potential reliability and performance problems well before April 15. “Site performance and stability is critical to us throughout tax season, but even more so on April 14th and 15th when traffic volumes spike as customers rush to meet the deadline,” said Dan Bartow, Senior Manager, Performance Engineering, Intuit. “Tax time is stressful enough for our customers, so our site reliability is essential in making the filing process as easy and fluid as possible for them.”

To that end, Intuit set quality and performance goals for the site and decided to test steadily increasing user loads, with the ultimate goal of testing at least 200% of their anticipated peak of concurrent users on tax day. But to achieve this goal, Intuit would have had to buy over 2,500 new servers to simulate that kind of traffic and test their software and environment. That option was just too expensive!

SOASTA CloudTest,  realistically simulates a variety of unconstrained user scenarios, accurately measures site performance from load generated via the cloud, and provides granular, real-time analysis and reporting to help pinpoint and address potential issues. Unlike other solutions, SOASTA’s cloud testing experts leverage the cloud to quickly and affordably simulate the real Web environment and its unique characteristics. “SOASTA literally became a part of our team and had us up and testing within days,” added Bartow. “Through CloudTest we were able to quickly and efficiently gauge both performance and availability, and find and fix errors and bottlenecks that we would never have uncovered in our own test lab or with any other solution.”

Having exceeded the scope of last years test by 75 times, for the first time in five years the TurboTax site performed perfectly on tax day.  Perhaps even more important to Dan and his team was the fact that in the days leading up to April 15th they were extremely confident in how well their site would perform.   “It was the most confident that we have ever been in an Intuit Application” said Dan.   So, if you are asking yourself  the question “are you ready?”…but do not think you can afford to test because of the cost of hardware….you might want to look into Leveraging Cloud Computing to test your web sites.

Reliability, is defined as the ability of a system to perform and maintain its functions in routine circumstances, as well as hostile or unexpected circumstances.   For the past ten years so many new software services from Twitter to iTunes have emerged to change our lives. Many that offer an easy-to-use interface and are either free or employ an incredibly reasonable pricing model, which might explain that when these services fail we continue to use them (Twitter). However, those days may be over. Everyday, new services flood the market, many that offer similar if not the same functions, making convenience no longer enough for customer retention. Convenience is being replaced by “reliability” as a key selection criteria for consumers. Sites that are slow, or even worse, those that crash, are losing out to sites that offer cool features but also offer a consistent and reliable experience for its consumers. Even aggregators of such services, such as FaceBook and Apple, are taking notice of what they are publishing to their sites these days with a growing concern that their own brand will be affected by poor performance by association. This forces SaaS vendors to look beyond their own cool features and rethink how with whom they deploy their applications with.   Even the leading Managed Service Providers (Rackspace, Terramark, and Savvis) and emerging Cloud Platform  Providers (Amazon, IBM, and Force.com) are rushing to deliver newer Services to ensure their customer’s that they have the most reliable deployment environment for SaaS based applications.  Reliability matters more today then ever!

Who isn’t delivering a web service today is a much easier question to answer then asking who is. But the fact remains, if a web service is not reliable then it will not last long, no matter how interesting it might be. Ensuring a service’s reliability has been a goal of every developer, but it has been nearly impossible to attain until now.

The biggest obstacle has always been the cost of testing at web scale. Web scale is different for every company. In some cases, it’s a few hundred users hitting a web site at the very same time. For others, it’s millions of users (i.e. Facebook). No matter what your volume, it’s very expensive to achieve web scale in testing. For example, lets look at the environment you need to test 17,000 concurrent users of a web site. If you use some open source testing tools, you will most likely have to have over (200) server cores in your test lab. Try buying, configuring, and maintaining that many server cores and you will realize that “some assembly required” does not come close to describing the complexity and cost . . . and still you’re not done. You also need load balancers, monitors, dashboards, alerting systems, etc. . . . you get the picture! Even if you had unlimited money and manpower to achieve “web scale” in testing, you still have the problem of simulating traffic coming from inside your firewall and not externally as most Web2.0 applications function. For these reasons and many more, most companies have given up on testing their applications and network against the real world traffic that they are expecting (i.e. web scale).

That is, until today. Cloud testing enables companies to easily and affordably simulate “web scale” by using the access, availability, and affordability of Cloud Computing to create simulated web traffic. Companies like Hallmark, Intuit, Chegg and many many others are experiencing, for the first time, the ability test their web sites at “web scale” and beyond before their big day or event occurs. Cloud testing is changing how we test our web applications forever!

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

My company SOASTA has provisioned over 30,000 cloud servers in the past year, using four different cloud platforms in doing so. Enterprise customers such as Intuit, Hallmark & Proctor & Gamble use our cloud testing service to load and performance test their web sites.

While I will not claim to be the largest cloud computing customer, I would assert that we know a little about the Cloud and its vendors. So, when I saw two recent blogs denouncing a new cloud initiative (one that is not even public yet) that calls for a movement toward an “Open Cloud” environment, I found their negative comments both amusing and disturbing. Amusing in that these individuals claiming to represent two leading edge cloud vendors were denouncing a new “idea” before it was even announced. Now that’s leading edge . . . and pretty amusing. I guess good ideas are only good when they are your ideas.

I also found their comments disturbing and lacking of in any real customer perspective on what we need from our cloud platform vendors in the first place. I became even more disturbed when one of the commentators was my leading cloud platform vendor . . . a vendor from whom we have provisioned nearly 27,000 servers with in the past year.

Dismissing an idea as not having merit without allowing it to see the light of day . . . being charitable . . . is a bit narrow. Why would these detractors shoot down openness in the first place? Seems a little like saying, “I’m against daylight”. You can complain all night, but the sun is still coming up in the morning.

As a CEO and a significant customer of cloud computing services, I would ask all the current and future platform vendors not to engage in traditional software politics and focus on what’s important. New ideas (especially in our industry and particularly in our current economy) should never be dismissed out of hand privately or publicly. They should be discussed and analyzed on their own merits, not dismissed on the basis of how they were introduced. I for one fully support this manifesto for an” Open Cloud Platform” and asked its authors to place my company’s name as one of its supporters. They have agreed to do so which suggests that the people who are pushing this open initiative are at least interested in how some “actual” customers of cloud computing may be thinking, while the companies who choose not to participate have sent a message to me (and others) that perhaps they are not.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

It appears that we are at the very early stage of what may become the largest redistribution of computing power since the late 80’s when we move from mainframe computers to desktops and servers. This triggered one of the biggest expansions in new jobs in the short history of the technology sector. Today, we once again face another market shift, and this time, the shift is away from the expensive and inefficient internal data centers model for a lower cost computing model called cloud computing. The cost of platforms for building, testing, and deploying web applications has become just too expensive to maintain internally and an alternative is required. Once again with new innovation, the opportunity to create a massive amount of new jobs is alive and well as we create new applications that will take advantage of this much lower cost delivery model.

Which brings me to my point, once again our technology sector is about to reinvent itself to meet a new market opportunity created by a business need and the emergence of technological innovation to meet this need.  In doing so, we will greatly expand our existing workforce to meet the potential of a much larger market opportunity.  Major shifts driven by innovation are not uncommon in the technology sector, why is this not true in other US industries? Wouldn’t it be nice to see in other sectors in our economy make similar market adjustments as quickly in the years to come. After all, innovation has always been one of the hallmarks of our country’s ability to lead. There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. We should dream of things that never were, and ask why not? (RFK).   It is time to embrace the innovation of cloud computing.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos