Cloud Perceived as Precarious by Companies
Cloudability study of 3,200 companies relying on the cloud, showed that 86% of them rely on 2 or more cloud solutions.

Will IE10 have a Monopoly on Windows RT (ARM processor)?
Mozilla’s general counsel writes about the limitations browsers are facing with the new Windows 8 RT and how IE is the only browser that can run on native mode in this platform.

IE9 – Not Just For Work
We previously reported on Chrome usage spiking during the weekend in our Browser Wars updates. Now, StatCounter, is reporting that IE9 usage spikes on the weekend as well, showing that IE is making a comeback as a “play-time” browser with their latest release.

That Widget Might Cost your Webpage 1.34 Seconds
Think twice before adding a widget to you page. The author of this blog article discovers that the Facebook widget on the page is adding 84KB of data and 1.34 seconds to the load time.

Hydra: Big data at AddThis
AddThis handles 3 billion visits a day, resulting in 10 terabytes of data. Hydra is their real time analytics solutions which relies on custom-built distributed file system to store the data

F5 Load Balancer Now Supports SPDY
F5 announced first-to-market Mobile Application Optimization with SPDY support at Interop 2012. The goal is to improve mobile browsing experience by delivering content more efficiently and improving webpage rendering. This is an update to their Application Delivery Control, which now supports SPDY for browsers/clients that have incorporated the protocol.

Facebook Now Offers Cloud Storage
Right before the IPO, Facebook announces that they are now dabbling with cloud storage with the release of a new feature that allows groups of users to share a file. This puts Facebook in competition with other storage services such as Apple and Dropbox.

From China: Teleportation for Data Security
Physicists in China have been able to teleport entangled protons the longest distance yet – 97kilometers. While this is cool for whatever Sci-Fi fantasy you may have, the current focus is on the possibilities of satellite-based quantum cryptography, which could provide the most secure connections yet.

Ebay Expanding on East Coast
New York City is getting another tech giant tenant – Ebay recently secured a 35,000 sq ft space for a new development space in Manhattan. They are following in the footsteps of Google, Facebook, and Twitter and are hoping to tap into the growing pool of East coast talent. Ebay is planning on opening its new office in the fall.

Browser Wars Continue
Conflicting reports are out by two analytic companies regarding the IE rebound driven by the new release of IE9. Net Applications, which accounted for geographical usage patterns, daily usage, pre-rendered pages, and its own analytics into the analysis, reports that IE usage grew from 53.8% in March to 54.1% in April. StatCounter, using a different methodology in which they only count raw page views, reports that IE is still continuing to slide while Chrome keeps on gaining momentum.

Connection Speed Dropped in 8 of 10 Top Countries
Akamai’s most recent State of the Internet report shows that the global connection speed at the end of 2011 had dropped 14% from the previous quarter to 2.3 Mbps.  The US (ranked no. 13) connection speed fell 5.3% to 5.87 Mbps.

Optimizing Images for Mobile and Web
Jeremy Keith shares his tricks for optimizing the dConstruct conference website – including serving monochromatic images and focusing only on faces on pictures.

Push for Cloud Means More APM
As more companies are adopting the cloud as an infrastructure solution, there is a push in the Application Performance Management (APM) market to evolve to offer the visibility into the cloud that companies now have a need for.  Traditional and in-house APM solutions may no longer be enough to provide the insight needed to take control.

Relying on a Browser Hack? Make sure you test well and keep on testing.
One trick web developers use to pre-cache resources is to pre-fetch JavaScript and CSS files by relying on the <img> tag.  Eric Law of Microsoft clearly describes why this “hack” will not work and results in “request aborts”, resulting in slower webpage loads. The solution will not work on IE6 to 10 and Firefox 12.

AWS to collect more than billion in revenue in 2012? 
The challenge to determine the size of Amazon Web Services is still on and here is the latest prediction – 1 -2 billion dollars a year in revenue.   Can anyone guess the profits?

Colocation Check List
Choosing a colocation site?  Here are a couple ‘out of the box’ questions to have on hand during the decision process.

Facebook Scuba project 
Using tricks from news feed implementation (delivering results of complex queries fast), engineers at Facebook built a real time internal infrastructure monitoring system capable of fast ad hoc analysis – delivering results that scanned hundreds of millions of samples in less than 1 second.

Who knew? JPEG uses less energy on your phone than GIF or PNG
Stanford researchers at the World Wide Web 2012 Conference presented data showing how free applications and top websites, even ones optimized for mobile, kill your smartphone’s battery. Energy consumption can be blamed mostly on advertising and browser downloading and parsing of Javascript and CSS.

Understanding Blekko’s NoSQL Database
The CTO of Blekko, a new spam-free search engine, describes the requirements it takes to build a search engine and datastore, including hardware and software options.  Using a new construct called Combinators, Blekko is able to manipulate data in the single cell level, instead of locking an entire row in as traditional NoSQL database.

Optimizing with the timeline panel
Want to troubleshoot site speed with the Chrome?  Check out this guide that shows how to use Timeline to find wasteful rendering operations.

Cloud computing still challenging for companies
Survey of the cloud utilization from 200 AWS customers showed that the majority of the companies are not properly utilizing the cloud.

The need for “Off the Shelf” data centers
White paper on the need for data center consumerisation and its benefits to business, quality. and cost savings.

Federal government agencies falling short on the IPv6 initiative
More than 99% of the federal government agencies do not support IPv6 on their public web infrastructure, falling short of meeting a 2010 directive from the the Obama administration. The key reason is lack of support for IPv6 by government contractors, including CDNs, network devices, and ISPs.

What is the right page speed target?
Level 3 blog post looks at why 2 seconds is the new page speed target and what is the correlation between page load speed and conversions. The article recommends sites to look at the maximum load time for a specific percentile, and focus on delivering pages in 2 seconds for specific user segments.

How Wayfair handled traffic load from a news article.
Wayfair engineering team discusses how they handled the unexpected traffic load from a news article which had a larger impact than Cyber Monday.

On other technology news, 10% of single men prefer getting the new iPad than a new partner.

Google retires faster SSL feature due to Legacy code
Eighteen months ago Google launched the False Start feature on Chrome to speed up the SSL handshake by as much as 30%. However, Google is now retiring the feature with Chrome 20 as it caused unavailability for several websites. Although Google tried to tackle the problem on several fronts it was unable to find a solid solution. The biggest challenge was legacy code in SSL Terminators, especially for international website.

Just when you thought your job never ended…
Engineers of Interxion, a collocation services company in charge of managing the Olympics, will work, eat, breathe, and sleep at their datacenter during the games.  The datacenter is equipped with sleeping pods, assuring they will always be onsite in case of a failure.

New strides for Quantum Computing 
Physicists from Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany have been able to transmit qubits, a quantum bit, across 21 meter optic fiber network by exciting atoms to release photons.

ICANN misses its own deadline 
Because of internal software issues, ICANN went “temporarily” offline for four days.  This unavailability lined up exactly with the deadline for TLD applications and thus ICANN is extending the deadline one week to April 20.

HP PC sales grow faster than Mac in Q1
Q1 Reports show Hewlett-Packard domestic computer sales passed Apple at 4.6 million PCs to 1.7 million Macs with a growth rate of 6.6% and 5%, respectively, over the previous quarter.

New Concurrent User Record for Skype
On Tuesday, April 10, Skype reached a new high record of 40 million concurrent users on their service.

Facebook release engineering takes a new approach to the big release
A point-blank blaming system requires that all developers must be online at the release and ready to take action if any of their code breaks. Luckily, if you do mess up, you can redeem yourself by restocking the bar at the immediate end of the workstation.

Cloud Perflift for 2012 – Will have Cost Impact
Traditionally, cloud computing platforms offered either a choice between old technology, low-cost public storage and more expensive, higher performance private clouds. Now, as buyers are wising up to performance impacts on revenue, there is a push in the market for solutions that offer a high availability, secure alternative for the smaller consumer. This hybrid cloud demand will drive up the cost of low-end solutions up.

Network Latency is No Longer an Enterprise Concern
As more and more people rely on richer web applications for entertainment and communication, network latency has a bigger impact on the home user. However for the typical user, unlike someone on trading networks on Wall Street, one cannot simply ask their provider for a better connection. Luckily, new products are development that help manage the consumer’s network – such as setting priority to certain packets that need to be delivered faster.

Amazon S3 Storage Growth for Q1 2012 Triggers Conflicting Press
Amazon reported growth in the first quarter of 2012 to their S3 services from 762 billion stored objects at the end of Q4 2011 to 905 billion objects. However, the data  provided on the blog was confusing as it provided yearly numbers prior to Q1 2012 – resulting conflicting news reactions. The question still remains did S3 growth slow down or accelerate?

Web Performance for Everyone!
Many network optimization techniques developed by major high scalability internet companies are now available as consumer products. Now, websites have an easier time scaling to more traffic without having to develop in house solutions.

After 13 Years, Even HTTP is About to get Perflift
Internet Engineering Task Force officially opened the discussion on how to improve the HTTP protocol to make the technology faster. Google’s SPDY proposal is the front runner due to its browser and server market share, however the group  leader stated that they  plan to review all proposals and SPDY could be a starting point.

Cache Insights From Steve Souders
Maximizing cache utilization and compressing text responses are key web performance technique. However, not all browsers cache compressed files the same way. IE and Safari store items in cache uncompressed, while other browser store the compressed file – maximizing the utilization of cache size limits.

The New 308 Permanent Redirect HTTP Status Code
Eric Law from Microsoft talks about the challenges of the newest HTTP status code, the 308 Permanent Redirect.

AOL Retires 9,500 Servers 
As part of the Server Roundup Contest to minimize energy utilization, AOL decommissioned 9,500 servers in less than 6 months to save $5.05 million.

Impact of 3rd Parties on US Site for Chinese Users
Everyone in the web performance community should know by now that 3rd party tags that load synchronously will impact end user experience. Yet, the majority of top US sites still have not solved this problem. Of course users from China are impacted the most due to the “Great Firewall“.

The Importance of Caching in Web Performance
Performance guru Steve Sounders covers the importance of caching requests and how well cache is utilized by web site owners and third party providers today. He also provides details on the browser cache settings and provides cache stats from the observations of IE and Chrome teams.

How OMGPOP Scaled its Infrastructure
The creators of Draw Something were able to scale their infrastructure to support 36 million users in 3 weeks by using a NoSQL database and cloud computing.  Engineers were able to deploy and reconfigure databases live with no hiccups.

Microsoft Proposal on HTTP 2.0 – Focus on webpages and applications
Microsoft stirs the browser wars by releasing their proposal on HTTP 2.0 which is based on SPDY, but goes further to support not only webpages on browsers but also applications. In their opinion SPDY was a good start, but not good enough of a solution.

What is Impacting Inter-cloud Communications? The Internet or Business Practices 
A recent survey by Nasuni on the data transfer between the top 3 cloud providers (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace) shows high latency in communications.  Transfer time ranged from 115 hours (Amazon S3 to Rackspace) to as little as 4 hours (Azure to Amazon S3) for 12 terabytes of data. One wonders what is causing the slowness in getting the data out of Amazon?

LinkedIn’s Databus: A Low Latency Change Data Capture System
Siddharth Anand from LinkedIn covers the need for Change Data Capture Systems and how LinkedIn’s own Databus system works. Databus distributes in near real time the updates from a primary data store (like a relational database) to a number of secondary data stores.

PC is Not and Endangered Species, Yet
With more and more people relying solely on mobile and tablet devices to browse the web and perform basic tasks, the role of the PC is losing its place as a household staple. Even former Microsoft Executive Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, claims we are in a “Post-PC” Era. However, there are still tasks associated with high bandwidth, availability, computing that require the PC. At the end of the day, we are moving in to a “PC plus” world rather than “Post PC”.

Cloud Computing Saboteurs and Counter Intelligence
Everyone is leasing datacenter space these days, including major internet giants like Google. Fear of neighboring competition sneaking a peak at top secret hardware caused Google to turn off the lights and close the blinds in their part of the corridor. Only Google employees can ascend into the darkness, equipped with a head lamp of course.  We wonder though, if a competitor made past security and into the Google datacenter – what would stop them from bringing a flashlight?

This fear is not without reason however, as everyone is trying to build a better, bigger, and more efficient cloud computing solution. A recent study released by Huan Liu at Accenture Technology Labs, predicted that Amazon’s Web Services is powered by at least 454,400 servers across seven global data center hubs.

Google Datacenter Going Green
Google is not only saving electricity by cutting the lights – they are also taking a creative approach to going green by spraying recycled waste water on servers to keep a new datacenter cool.

Stormy Days
Leap Day 2012 was the trip and stumble felt around the world for Microsoft Azure.  A calendar bug caused failures in Azure clusters all over the world when all regions entered Leap Day at the same moment (proving redundancy is not perfect). Combined with the recent Amazon EC2 hiccups, companies are now re-considering their cloud strategies and looking at a multi-vendor approach.

If you don’t like it, build it yourself
The Chromium team ran several performance tests for DNS resolution on IPv6 enabled machines and it was not happy with the resolution speed of the OS (Windows, Mac, or Linux).  As a result the team is working on building their own DNS stub resolver to distribute with Chrome browser.

Higher Resolution, Smaller Screens, More Performance Headaches
The release of the new iPad, boasting an even-more-retinal-display, is causing a surge in the population of people surfing the web with HD screens. This will have huge impact on how images are served as normal resolution images appear fuzzy on HD screens. The solution isn’t as clear-cut as just increasing resolution – images account for about 60% of total downloaded bytes and tripling the resolution to keep up with iPads will cause the page size to double!

Windows 8’s Complete Makeover Extends to IE
Microsoft engineers not only rethought the desktop experience in building Windows 8, but they also did a complete makeover in IE, optimizing the browsing experience for keyboard, mouse, and touch. Look for a completely new way to integrate websites and apps as designers sought to make heavy workflow as seamless as possible.

At Catchpoint, we don’t just write blogs – we read them too! We often share worthy articles with clients and wanted to expand the sharing to the blog followers. On a weekly basis we will post on our blog a digest of the most interesting articles on IT Operations and Web Performance. Enjoy them and share them with friends and colleagues.

Cloud Pricing Wars – Game On
Last week,  Amazon AWS reduced their prices by as much as 42% for certain reserved EC2 instances. This was the 19th time Amazon lowered their prices and it triggered a pricing war in the cloud space. Google was quick to announce on the same day their new reduced prices that are slightly lower than AWS. While 3 days later Microsoft followed up with prices cuts on Azure.  While the lower prices will help with the migration to the cloud, companies shopping for a cloud provider are still challenged by the difference in the computing instances packages which make any comparison quite hard. Maybe the Cloud Providers need to introduce a price/unit concept like the products in your local grocery shelves.
Web boom causes demand for new data centers
A new report out by Campos Research and Analysis on behalf of Digital Realty Trust shows a growing demand for more data centers worldwide. In North America 92% of the respondents claimed they will probably to definitely increase their colo spending this year in the US, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America, in order of planned expansion.  85% of respondents worldwide intend to increase resources as opposed to 82% at the end of 2010.
Creative Crash Pages Making the Best Out of a Bad Situation 
Despite ample prevention, all sites are bound to crash or be unavailable at some point. How a company handles such scenario, can make a difference.  Bonobos showed during the Small Business Summit 2012 that with a little bit of humor and a dash of humility, a well thought out Down Page can turn a revenue crisis into a marketing opportunity, even if the crash happened on Cyber Monday.  Other retailers should take notice and plan for similar action in 2012 – it pays off to be ready.
IBM Processor Can Move Data at 1 Tb/s 
As computing technology is advancing and servers pack more and more processors, the network overhead or latency is becoming a growing bottleneck. IBM released a new solution, the Holey Optochip, which can move data at 1 trillion bits per second (1 terabyte per second) by firing lasers through the 48 holes in the chip. The Holey Octochip (not for sale) is 8 times faster than the fastest chips in the market today and 10k times faster than a standard 100 Mb/s Ethernet connection.