It’s a Saturday afternoon: An email from a customer drove me to start troubleshooting an issue they were experiencing with Amazon S3. They were experiencing random high wait time, usually an indication of a problem with communication back to some sort of an origin system. Should’ve been a piece of…
Last Saturday, our washer and dryer decided to call it quits after 14 years of amazing service. As you can imagine, this is a major crisis for family with children. P0 priority! All hands on deck! Therefore, Sunday at 7 AM, we were in front of our local Home Depot in…
This article was originally published as a byline for CMS Wire. Given the increasing reliance on digital systems to accomplish many everyday tasks, there’s no denying the performance — specifically, speed, and reliability — of these systems is critical to ensuring end users will have a positive experience. At the…
In the digital world, performance, availability, and reliability are key pillars of business that can impact revenue, reputation, and operational excellence. We often write about the impact that third-party services have on performance on our blog, but sometimes that impact is felt in our personal lives as well. Every year, we…
What was supposed to be a quiet Friday suddenly turned into a real “Black Friday” for us (as well as most of the Internet) when Dyn suffered a major DDOS attack. From an internet disruption’s perspective, the widespread damage the outage caused made it the worst I have ever experienced. At…
In Part I, we discussed the various components of HTTP request. In particular, we walked the reader through the details of TLS (Transport Layer Security), its impact on performance and how to mitigate it. Besides security, mobile performance has assumed the center stage owing to increasing use of mobile devices…
One of the key driving factors behind the various web/mobile performance initiatives is the fact that end-users’ tolerance for latency has nose-dived. Several studies have been published whereby it has been demonstrated that poor performance routinely impacts the bottom line, viz,. # users, # transactions, etc. Examples studies include this,…
While visiting a customer last week (a large SaaS platform company), we started to have an interesting discussion around Service Level Agreements (SLAs) during which he encouraged me to write this blog. When I was tasked with setting up the QoS Team at DoubleClick in 1999, the primary mission was to setup a monitoring team (internal,…
A company’s collection of online systems is like a delicate ecosystem – all components must integrate with and complement each other, and one single malfunction in any of them can bring the entire system to a screeching halt. That’s why, when monitoring and analyzing the health of your online systems,…
In early 2016, we decided to launch our first Hackathon, reIMAGINE. The rules of the event were simple: Assemble a team Rally around an idea Build a prototype of a solution that can benefit our customers (internal or external) It must solve a business problem The teams had three days to pick members…
