Twitter, SMS, iPhone and Apple WWDC
No doubt there will be plenty of cameras, recording devices, and connected people trying to let everyone know about the announcements at the Apple WWDC. And in particular, the Steve Jobs Keynote address. Many people like myself use twitter to keep in touch with things going on. But in light of some of the recent outages with twitter, will it be another meltdown of the system?
Venturebeat has more detail about the past problems with with the social networking/messaging tool. My spin on it is will it be able to keep up with all the people sending and receiving SMS? I remember back in 1998, the messages about Internet bottlenecks, outages about eBay, Amazon, Hotmail, and more. How this wreaked havoc, grabbing headlines for the media to obsess over. But with load balancing, distributing computing, data and application caching, these things seem to be a thing of the past.
So why is twitter having so much difficulty? My sense is that there are still web companies and perhaps Web 2.0 companies who have lots of skilled developers, but lack of architects and strong tech ops people to handle the difficulty of building for scale and high availability. I harken back to my days when I was working in a data center and we always had to plan for disasters. The disaster of success, when overnight the CPU load went from 10% to 50%, hard drives were filling up with log files, new content, bandwidth across the infrastructure was peaking at 80% and we hoped that all that we had built with the routers and switches would hold up. And when the spikes subsided, we performed some analysis about what went on before the next wave could occur.
I just hope that with all the hype about this upcoming WWDC, Apple and the new iPhone, that there will be few Internet outages (Amazon reported a two-hour one just last week), and that the two-way mobile to web interconnects will be able to survive the load and stress from all the traffic expected.
