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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
How to bulletproof your website
'Tis the season to begin ramping up online shopping activity, and for retailers that means doing all they can to ensure their websites are up, highly available and able to handle peak capacity. Looming in many IT managers' minds is the cautionary tale of Target, whose website crashed twice this fall after it was inundated by an unprecedented number of online shoppers when the retailer began selling clothing and accessories from high-end Italian fashion company Missoni.
"We are working around the clock to ensure that our site is operating efficiently and delivering an exceptional guest experience that's reflective of Target's brand,'' said a Target spokesperson in an email, but declined to give specifics on the measures the company has taken.
One company's hardship is often another company's gain, and those that face well-publicized failures tend to become de facto role models, retail industry watchers say. Take what happened to Best Buy in 2005: Its website experienced what some have called a catastrophic holiday failure and customers were unable to make online purchases. That same year, competitor Circuit City saw a huge spike in traffic, says Dave Karow, senior product manager of Web performance and testing at Keynote, a firm that monitors and tests mobile and Internet performance.
"There's nothing like falling flat on your face to give you the conviction to do right thing going forward. That was an extremely effective wakeup call for Best Buy,'' he says, adding that the retailer now conducts several load tests throughout the year.
Web retailers should be shooting for 99.5% availability, otherwise "they're not cutting it," Karow maintains. "Ninety-nine percent is not acceptable because if you achieve that, you're still one percent unavailable." That has a significant impact since it means more than one percent of potential transactions didn't occur -- and likely won't going forward, he says.
This holiday season, more than ever, Web retailers need to be prepared for the onslaught, since a growing number of consumers will be using mobile devices to shop. A report recently released by mobile ad network InMobi claims an estimated 60 million mobile users are planning to use their devices to shop during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday holiday weekend, with over 21 million intending to make purchases from those devices.
Prepare, test and review
Online shoe retailer Zappos conducts load testing early in the fall to ensure its site stays up and highly available during the holiday season, says Kris Ongbongan, senior manager, technical operations and systems engineering. Every year they follow the same procedure, he says: estimate load.
"We have our finance and planning departments give us sales predictions and we take a multiple of that to see what traffic we can absorb and test to that," typically beginning in September, Ongbongan says. That gives them enough time to make changes and add any necessary infrastructure.
Retailers should go through their transaction volume testing and validation in the September/October timeframe and then code lock their systems until about January 15th, suggests Michael Ebert, a partner in IT Advisory Services at KPMG. During that period, "retailers typically freeze their systems ... and don't do updates unless absolutely necessary to avoid performance issues,'' he says.
Another practice the very large Internet retailers tend to employ is having distributed networks in order to route traffic to make sure transactions are balanced around the U.S., Ebert says. That way, if one site gets too busy the customer will automatically be routed to another. "So make sure you have multiple points of your Internet presence around the U.S." A data center "may be slow to respond, but at least I'm up and running,'' he adds. "There's always a percentage of business you never regain if someone leaves the site."
Another metric that retailers need to be concerned with is latency, or the response time for how long it takes a page to load and for the payment transaction to be completed. "I expect we'll see some latency concerns" or other problems during the check-out step during this holiday season, predicts Greg Girard, program director, IDC Retail Insights. That's because there are throughput bottleneck issues at the gateway to the credit card processing network, he says.
"The micro-economic problem is that it costs money to maintain capacity that you utilize only at the peak time, which is only very infrequently during the year. It's an economical tradeoff you have to make."
Over-provisioning via cloud
For a lot of smaller online retailers, it's hard to justify the return on investment for increasing the capacity they need to handle 12 hours of peak usage on one day of the year, says Girard. "That's where cloud comes into play, and we're seeing some retailers adopt cloud strategies. That's really going to progress going forward." Retailers will be able to get additional peak capacity at an incremental cost by moving to the cloud, he says.
Zappos' Ongbongan says they handle all network functions internally and do not use cloud providers. "We have instrumentation around every transaction point on the website, from search pages to product detail pages to checkout," he says, "so we can look at each individually to see if there's any slowness or problems in any of those areas."
But no matter how prepared you are, problems can still occur, especially when you outsource to third-party vendors. "Nothing is fully bulletproof, so really what [online retailers] need to try and achieve is fault tolerance,'' says Mike Gualtieri, a principal at Forrester Research. He recalls a retailer he worked with that uses an external credit card service that went down one year on Cyber Monday, so the company's orders couldn't be processed.
"Their e-commerce system is in-house, so they had planned for volumes -- searching and shopping the site -- but they have a service level agreement with a credit card service processing service that said, 'We can handle that volume.' So they did all the right things for their own systems and planned for the [increased] volume on Cyber Monday, but were held hostage by this particular provider,'' Gualtieri says.
He says he recommended that the retailer re-architect its site so if the payment processor were to go down again the company could still collect the order and payment information and process payments at a later time. That's particularly useful for small retailers, he says, who may not be able to invest in technologies like an online shopping cart and have to rely on third parties for the functionality.
Regardless of their size, Gualtieri says, retailers need to examine every component of their systems and assign a confidence level between one and five. "Every online retailer should look at their entire ecommerce architecture and all the components they use: shopping cart, products search, account registration--whatever they have--and rate their confidence level.
"Don't assume that everything will go right,'' Gualtieri says. "Assign a confidence level and don't fret too much, but have a mitigation strategy and backup plan."
Optimize for traffic
Among the lessons Karmaloop learned during the 2010 holiday season were that its content delivery network configuration was not optimized for the traffic it was going to experience on Cyber Monday, says Joseph Finsterwald, CTO at the online retailer of alternative street fashion for men and women. "We worked with our CDN vendor Akamai to come up with a configuration that was a better fit for us,'' he says. The firm also discovered problems with parallel processes on the network and synchronization issues when servicing up Web pages, which was corrected by rewriting code.
Revenues are growing 50% to 70% year over year, Finsterwald says, so Karmaloop is using Keynote's LoadPro Web load-testing services to ensure its site is not strained. Because its CDN network was not optimized to handle this level of traffic in past years, the site experienced "frequent" network outrages, he said, although he declined to provide specifics.
"It gives you peace of mind that we can come up with a reasonable facsimile under peak load,'' Finsterwald says. "Load testing is an inelegant science; you're trying to simulate user traffic, but you're integrating a lot of third-party components." If a test is done on a quiet day, a third party may be able to scale to handle that, but all bets might be off when they're handling multiple clients.
This year, when conducting load testing, Karmaloop scaled its systems to a high enough load to trigger a problem for the vendors to address proactively. "We saw performance degradation with some of our vendors," says Finsterwald, "so we're following up with them to make sure they're doing what they need to do."
Keynote's Karow concurs. "Load testing done right has to be a very close representation of what real users are going to do, so it takes real thinking about what people do and the various systems involved and are you stressing those systems?"
Talk to your stakeholders
Also critical to the success of keeping systems up and highly available is making sure everyone is on the same page. "Everybody needs to be involved in the planning and predictive process,'' says Zappos' Ongbongan. At Zappos, that means everyone from brand marketing to financial planning to warehouse staff is involved in planning for peaks in site traffic.
One thing his group learned from talking with other departments was that their peak traffic typically occurs in mid-December, as opposed to right after Thanksgiving or right before Christmas.
Forrester's Gualtieri says it's a definitely a problem when a marketing group doesn't let IT know what it's doing that might cause site traffic to spike. He says he worked with a large Midwestern insurance company that spent a couple of million dollars on its first TV ad during a football game. When the ad aired, the company's site went down "almost instantly," because the company's marketing department didn't tell IT it was running the ad. "So IT had no idea they were going to expect 500 times the normal amount of traffic,'' he says, and they ended up wasting their money on the ad.
Despite all the proactive measures retailers may be taking, Gaultieri predicts there will still be "some high-profile outages" this holiday season. "One, two or several will happen. I also think a lot will happen that you'll never hear about ... I don't think this problem is going to go away."
Although companies are becoming savvier about bulletproofing their sites, crashes will inevitably occur due to continuous changes made to enhance the online shopping experience, he says. "You can't just put a site up and have it be static; there are lots of moving parts and it creates complexity, and there's fallout."
Monday, October 31, 2011
'Jackass' star Bam Margera's Porsche hit in Pa.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Police say a new Porsche driven by "Jackass" star Bam Margera has been sideswiped by another motorist in suburban Philadelphia.
State troopers say there were no injuries or citations issued in Thursday's accident near Margera's home in Pocopson Township.
Margera's mother tells The Philadelphia Inquirer(http://bit.ly/sJR4Mh ) that a truck scraped the length of her son's 4-month-old Panamera while he was stopped at a stop sign.
April Margera says the other driver told Bam that he was looking at his GPS when the crash happened. She says the motorist became excited when he realized who he'd hit.
Margera says her son called home immediately after the accident to get insurance information.
"Jackass" co-star Ryan Dunn and another man died in a drunken driving crash in the area in June.
YouTube launches broad entertainment venture
YouTube is making a bold step into original programming in an entertainment venture with some 100 content creators, from Madonna to The Wall Street Journal.
The Google Inc.-owned video site said Friday that it's launching more than 100 new video channels. The partners include an array of Hollywood production companies, celebrities and new media groups that will produce mainly niche-oriented videos.
YouTube is shelling out $100 million to producers, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The money is an advance on advertising money the videos will bring in, and Google will recoup its portion first before splitting the proceeds. Advances are as high as $5 million per channel, said another person familiar with the arrangement, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
Neither person was authorized to comment publicly on the matter.
Google declined to offer financial details of the deals, but said the majority of revenue will go to partners.
Participants include Madonna, former NBA star Shaquille O'Neal, comedian Amy Poehler, actorAshton Kutcher, "Office" star Rainn Wilson, spiritual doctor Deepak Chopra and "Modern Family" actress Sofia Vergara. Most are creating channels through their production companies. Madonna is a partner with the dance channel DanceOn, while O'Neal plans the Comedy Shaq Network.
Lionsgate is presenting a fitness channel, and other channels will be launched by news satire the Onion, professional wrestling's WWE, online magazine Slate and news service Thomson Reuters.
The channels will roll out beginning this month, though most will premiere next year. YouTube says the channels will add 25 hours of new original content daily, with dozens of Web series debuting at scheduled times.
Ultimately, YouTube is aiming to create a new digital video platform that will rival television programming.
In a blog posting Friday night, YouTube said the channels are being developed "specifically for the digital age." The video site compared the expanded video offerings to the advent of cable television.
YouTube has tried to build a more advertiser-friendly product of professional-quality video, as opposed to simply user-created videos. Advertisers generally prefer to have their ads matched with known quantities. YouTube has also previously tried to urge viewers to stay longer with TV-like services like the YouTube Leanback, which continuously plays a personalized selection of videos.
Google is also looking to add professionally produced content to its huge roster of user-generated videos, to give users of its Google TV platform something to watch.
Major Hollywood networks such as News Corp.'s Fox and The Walt Disney Co.'s ABC have blocked their content from being shown on Google TV because the sides have been unable to come to a licensing deal that the networks believes pays them fairly. Networks also don't want to jeopardize their lucrative relationship with pay TV distributors like Comcast Corp. and DirecTV.
Google is a platform that has been adopted by set-top box maker Logitech, which makes a device called a Logitech Revue that sells for $100.
Steve Jobs’ Final Words Shared in Sister’s Eulogy
Steve Jobs’ sister Mona Simpson shared in the eulogy she delivered at the late Apple CEO‘s memorial service that his surprising final words from his deathbed were, “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.”
In the intimate eulogy, which was printed in The New York Times on Sunday, Simpson describes Jobs’ final days and moments in a Palo Alto hospital, which was spent surrounded by his family as his breathing gradually became shorter.
His breath, she said, “indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.”
Delivered at the October 16 service for Jobs at Stanford Memorial Church, Simpson, an accomplished novelist, began by describing her initial meeting of her brother for the first time when she was in her mid-20s. Simpson was born in 1957, two years after Jobs, who was given up for adoption as an infant.
“Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother,” Simpson said.
Simpson went on to describe her strong relationship with the man now know for the revolutionizing computer world, while explaining Jobs’ work ethic and capacity for love — particularly for his wife Laurene and as a doting father to their three children.
“Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him,” she said.
In describing his illness from pancreatic cancer, which Jobs was diagnosed with in October 2003, Simpson paints a picture of Jobs as an enduring, “intensely emotional man.”
She concluded her eulogy by sharing Jobs’ final moments, which were spent staring lovingly at his family, and his final three monosyllabic words as he stared into the distance past their shoulders: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
Simpson is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has written five novels, and won the Whiting Prize for her debut, “Anywhere But Here.”
Soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo sends racy pics to everyone -- including model girlfriend Irina Shayk
How embarrassing! The Real Madrid star is said to be completely humiliated
Jasper Juinen/Getty Images
Cristiano Ronaldo (R) forwarded some racy pictures of a fan to fiancee Irina Shayk -- and everyone else in his email address book.He may have spectacular footwork on the soccer field, but apparently Cristiano Ronaldo is a bit of a klutz with his email.
The soccer star accidentally forwarded flirty messages and x-rated pictures from a fan to everyone in his message book - including model fiancée Irina Shayk, London's the Sunday Mirror reported.
"Cristiano's phone has been buzzing with calls and emails from bewildered pals in the past few days," a source said. "They have all been ringing and messaging to ask what the hell the email is about. And of course they all want to know more about the girl in the pictures."
The pictures included one of the fan in a tight T-shirt with the words "Too Hot To Handle", according to the report.
Luckily for Ronaldo, his Sports Illustrated swimsuit model wife-to-be seemed to shrug off the incident.
"He is embarrassed about the whole thing and is particularly mortified at passing the email on to Irina," the source told the paper. "But he has done nothing wrong and luckily Irina hasn't confronted him about it."
Michael Jackson caused his own death, defense witness argues
Dr. Paul White argues pop star gave himself the lethal dose
Pool/Getty Images
Dr. Paul White, an anesthesiologist and propofol expert, holds a bottle of propofol during the final stage of Dr. Conrad Murray's defense during Murray's involuntary manslaughter trial in the death of singer Michael Jackson.Pop star Michael Jackson caused his own death, a defense witness argued on Saturday.
Dr. Paul White said, based on the coroners' report, that Jackson gave himself the fatal dose of propofol and also gave himself an sedative orally after an original propofol infusion by Dr. Conrad Murray failed to put him to sleep, the Associated Press reported.
Murray, Jackson's personal doctor, is on trial for involuntary manslaughter in the singer's death.
White said that Murray's original dose would have taken 10-15 minutes to work, giving Jackson ample time to inject himself with more once Murray left the room.
That, combined with additional drugs in his body, is what killed him, according to the witness.
"It potentially could have lethal consequences," said White. "... I think the combination effect would be very, very profound."
The prosecution argued last week that Murray gave Jackson as much propofol as he requested, no matter the consequences. Dr. Steven Shafer testified that Jackson would have been groggy from the medicine Murray had already administered - and could not have given himself the drug, according to the AP.
He can't give himself an injection if he's asleep," Shafer reportedly said.
Murray has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
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