Re: Using twitter as an outage notification (was: Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle)
Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during an emergency, isn't an option.
The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one SMS).
If the event is suitably calamitous we will do that for you - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/5194672.stm brandon
In article <200907041222.NAA23352@sunf10.rd.bbc.co.uk>, Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk> writes
Paying a lot more to host the website with higher "burst" capacity during an emergency, isn't an option.
The only other idea I've had is to sign all the customers up to receive an SMS via some sort of broadcast service (the news will fit easily in one SMS).
If the event is suitably calamitous we will do that for you -
The "event" (typically closing a High School because of snow, but we have swine flu these days too) is currently reported mainly by local radio stations. However it doesn't scale - there are perhaps two hundred of them trying to phone in to one radio station during the same 15 minutes after they made the decision, half an hour before the school is supposed to open for the day. Another problem with a literally "broadcast" system is that it takes them too long to read out the names of the schools which are closed, even if trying to cover just one county. Nor does it matter to anyone except a particular closed group of perhaps 1000 households whether any one school is closed - so telling everyone is a bit of a waste. So it seemed to me that a Tweet from the school would be an ideal solution. But a system like yours, if it could be divided up into a few tens of thousands of SIGs (one for each school), is the kind of "more traditional" solution I was thinking about. -- Roland Perry
On Monday, July 6, 2009 10:00am, "Michael Holstein" <michael.holstein@csuohio.edu> said:
However it doesn't scale
Anyone who's seen the "fail whale" might argue the same about Twitter.
Cheers,
Michael Holstein Cleveland State University
With a past week of highly visible outages in the data center/provider industry, take a look at the section: "Crisis Communications Moves Fast" in this story, for another view of using communications channels like Twitter. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/06/the-day-after-a-bruta... -- Nevin Lyne -- CTO -- EngineHosting.com
On Jul 6, 2009, at 11:08 AM, nevin@enginehosting.com wrote:
On Monday, July 6, 2009 10:00am, "Michael Holstein" <michael.holstein@csuohio.edu
said:
However it doesn't scale
Anyone who's seen the "fail whale" might argue the same about Twitter.
Cheers,
Michael Holstein Cleveland State University
With a past week of highly visible outages in the data center/ provider industry, take a look at the section: "Crisis Communications Moves Fast" in this story, for another view of using communications channels like Twitter. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/06/the-day-after-a-bruta...
-- Nevin Lyne -- CTO -- EngineHosting.com
Just to add something to this, twitter has been slow all afternoon and now I am getting the "fail whale" Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again I presume that this has something to do with the Michael Jackson Memorial Service now underway. I just thought I would point out in real time the obvious danger of using a backup service that itself could fail under load, especially if your outage and the load could be correlated, say in a disaster or public emergency situation. Regards Marshall
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
However it doesn't scale
Anyone who's seen the "fail whale" might argue the same about Twitter.
Just to add something to this, twitter has been slow all afternoon and now I am getting the "fail whale"
I just thought I would point out in real time the obvious danger of using a backup service that itself could fail under load, especially if your outage and the load could be correlated, say in a disaster or public emergency situation.
yep, got that too several time, but everytime i "reload" the page it works , there were plenty of outages before twitter got the 35 million cash injection , but your absolutly right , its centralisted , so there will be serverfarms over serverfarms to get over these "event" peaks. Would a decentralised system like http://laconi.ca/ not a better choice ? just my 50 cents http://identi.ca/macbroadcast/ -- Les enfants teribbles - research / deployment Marc Manthey Vogelsangerstrasse 97 D - 50823 Köln - Germany Vogelsangerstrasse 97 Geo: 50.945554, 6.920293 PGP/GnuPG: 0x1ac02f3296b12b4d Tel.:0049-221-29891489 Mobil:0049-1577-3329231 web : http://www.let.de Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise). Please note that according to the German law on data retention, information on every electronic information exchange with me is retained for a period of six months.
On Jul 7, 2009, at 4:03 PM, Marc Manthey wrote:
However it doesn't scale
Anyone who's seen the "fail whale" might argue the same about Twitter.
Just to add something to this, twitter has been slow all afternoon and now I am getting the "fail whale"
I just thought I would point out in real time the obvious danger of using a backup service that itself could fail under load, especially if your outage and the load could be correlated, say in a disaster or public emergency situation.
yep, got that too several time, but everytime i "reload" the page it works , there were plenty of outages before twitter got the 35 million cash injection , but your absolutly right , its centralisted , so there will be serverfarms over serverfarms to get over these "event" peaks. Would a decentralised system like http://laconi.ca/ not a better choice ?
In a real crisis, redundancy rules. Regards Marshall
just my 50 cents
http://identi.ca/macbroadcast/ -- Les enfants teribbles - research / deployment Marc Manthey Vogelsangerstrasse 97 D - 50823 Köln - Germany Vogelsangerstrasse 97 Geo: 50.945554, 6.920293 PGP/GnuPG: 0x1ac02f3296b12b4d Tel.:0049-221-29891489 Mobil:0049-1577-3329231 web : http://www.let.de
Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise).
Please note that according to the German law on data retention, information on every electronic information exchange with me is retained for a period of six months.
Regards Marshall Eubanks CEO / AmericaFree.TV
On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
In a real crisis, redundancy rules.
... and simplicity. It's always "fun" when those outages pages rely on sql backends etc, so they're capable of tens or hundreds of users, so they look fine normally. When an outage happens and people really need the information and want it, things stop working. I've been advocating a distributed system with static HTML pages being generated and pushed out when things change. Huge load capability, you can put it anycasted at multiple IXes so it's geographically and ISP resiliant, larger ISPs can even request to get their own mirror. Keeping it simple. No takers yet though, people seem to have too much confidence in complicated, centralized, nice looking solutions. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson<swmike@swm.pp.se> wrote:
On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
In a real crisis, redundancy rules.
... and simplicity.
It's always "fun" when those outages pages rely on sql backends etc, so they're capable of tens or hundreds of users, so they look fine normally. When an outage happens and people really need the information and want it, things stop working.
I've been advocating a distributed system with static HTML pages being generated and pushed out when things change. Huge load capability, you can put it anycasted at multiple IXes so it's geographically and ISP resiliant, larger ISPs can even request to get their own mirror. Keeping it simple.
No takers yet though, people seem to have too much confidence in complicated, centralized, nice looking solutions.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
http://www.coralcdn.org/ -- Brandon Galbraith Mobile: 630.400.6992
On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Brandon Galbraith wrote:
Nice, looks very much like the thing I was advocating. Hard part is getting authorities et al interested in such an "ad hoc" solution. Preferrably they could do both and then we can see which one works best in an emergency :P -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Jul 7, 2009, at 4:24 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
In a real crisis, redundancy rules.
... and simplicity.
It's always "fun" when those outages pages rely on sql backends etc, so they're capable of tens or hundreds of users, so they look fine normally. When an outage happens and people really need the information and want it, things stop working.
I've been advocating a distributed system with static HTML pages being generated and pushed out when things change. Huge load capability, you can put it anycasted at multiple IXes so it's geographically and ISP resiliant, larger ISPs can even request to get their own mirror. Keeping it simple.
This would seem to be ideal for P2P, which is decentralized and has proven quite resilient under attack.
No takers yet though, people seem to have too much confidence in complicated, centralized, nice looking solutions.
Have you talked to the guys at BitTorrent ? I could make introductions during the Stockholm IETF if you need them.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
Regards Marshall Eubanks AmericaFree.TV
participants (8)
-
Brandon Butterworth -
Brandon Galbraith -
Marc Manthey -
Marshall Eubanks -
Michael Holstein -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
nevin＠enginehosting.com -
Roland Perry