Just Another Manic Cyber Monday: Are you Ready?

Once September starts to roll around it seems like everyone’s preparing for something, be it returning to school, the fantasy football season, corporate budget planning, or looking for deals on end of model year vehicles. For me, it’s the time of year when I help people prepare for Cyber Monday, which has become the biggest online shopping day of the year.

So, is your website really ready to capitalize on all that buying fervor? Think about it. By September, your company is surely finalizing new products and marketing campaigns for the holiday season. But all those preparations will be for naught if your website isn't up to the challenge of increased holiday traffic – especially if your ops group doesn't have a system in place to monitor and react to the impact of that traffic in real time. The truth is, if your organization doesn't have a strategy in place by early September, you have a scant few weeks remaining to put one together. After that is done, you’re at serious risk of becoming ‘that company’ – you know, the one that makes headlines this holiday season for a massive site outage instead of record sales numbers – and the risk increases exponentially with every week you delay. If your company sells products that people want to give as gifts for the holidays, Cyber Monday is likely to be the busiest day of the year for your website.

Read the rest of this post here.
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

I don't produce software systems.
I help those who do produce software systems do it better.
I am a tester.

Any Given Thursday – Digging into Nasdaq’s 3-Hour Outage

This has been an uncharacteristically bad week for web performance, with several major and historically reliable services reporting outages due to "network issues". In my (not always so humble) opinion:

"Insufficient available bandwidth causing an outage, however, bothers me. A lot. There is absolutely no good reason for insufficient bandwidth to cause an outage. Maybe a slowdown, but if a flood of network traffic (not a flood of traffic to your site, just a whole bunch of traffic on the same network as your site) leads to an outage, something is wrong, at least in my book."

Read the rest of Any Given Thursday
Read part 1 of my commentary in Any Given Monday

--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

I don't produce software systems.
I help those who do produce software systems do it better.
I am a tester.

Any Given Monday – Google, Microsoft and Amazon All Experience Outages

It started out like any other Monday morning. I woke up, got dressed, put my contacts in and started making my way to the kitchen for coffee. Along the way, I launched a browser and the mail client on my laptop (as I always do on “home office” days) and I checked to make sure my son was up. After making coffee, I had a few minutes before it was time to drive my 14-year-old to school, I scanned the headlines in my newsfeed.

The top two headlines read:

• Google Outage: Internet Traffic Plunges 40%
• Microsoft apologizes for Outlook, ActiveSync downtime, says error overloaded servers

I only got to read the hover-over teaser paragraphs before:

   a) I realized it was no longer like any other Monday morning and
   b) my son informed me it was time to go.

I am a link to the rest (and best) of this post

Do you have additional insight into, or were you impacted by any of these outages? Comment below.

--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

I don't produce software systems.
I help those who do produce software systems do it better.
I am a tester.

Possible Discounts for Conference Adjacent Engagements!

I am booked to speak at several international conferences during the remainder of this year where I have availability immediately before and/or after to conduct consulting/training for companies or groups local to the conference. Any cost savings I realize by extending my trips (as opposed to making completely separate trips) will be passed on to paying clients. I'm looking forward to working with the folks who take advantage of this rare opportunity.

Specifically, I am available to the "first signed" clients for the following dates in the following locations:

• September 9-13 and/or September 18-20; in/around Prague,Czech Republic (before/after Agile Prague)  
• October 7-11; in/around Sydney, Australia (before iqnite)
• October 22-25; in/around Waterloo, Canada (after Targeting Quality)
• October 28-November 1 and/or November 11-15; in/around Malmö, Sweden (before/after Øredev)

If you are even mildly interested in engaging me during one of these blocks, please email me immediately. I expect them to fill quickly.

If you are not sure of what services I offer, you can check out the PerfTestPlus website, or take a look at my most commonly requested and (reportedly) valuable offerings below. There are, of course, other services I'd be happy to provide. If you don't see what you are looking for, please contact me and ask.

Lessons from NEXT2012 in Romania

I often see folks blogging about what they learned, were inspired by, or impressed them about attending an event. it is far less often when I see a headliner, or promoted presenter blog about the lessons they learned or what inspired or impressed them after the event. I've often wondered why that is.

For me, it has a lot to do with needing to quickly shift gears upon completing an event to catch-up on all the things that I put off to prepare for the event, figure out what immediate stuff landed in my inbox while I was ignoring it, and to follow-up on leads, lessons, inspirations and curiosities from the event itself.

Well, I'm going to make a concerted effort to do better about posting my lessons from events, starting with NEXT2012, hosted by SoftVision, held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Oct. 26-27
So, what were my take-aways from NEXT2012?

• I'm *really* excited about how I'm now organizing and packaging my performance-related materials (more on that in a separate post).
• SoftVision did a fantastic job organizing and handling logistics.
• I am seriously impressed with the people I interacted with on both a professional and technical level.
• Those same people are social, collaborative, friendly and are able to enjoy their work and create enjoyable work environments while being professionally and technically impressive.
• Romania (as well as several surrounding areas not widely considered "software/technical powerhouses") is an emerging market worth watching.