Comments on: Takeaways From the Facebook and Foursquare Outages

By: What Was the Biggest Internet Outage of 2010?: Tech News «

What Was the Biggest Internet Outage of 2010?: Tech News « — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:01:04 +0000

[...] down for about a third of the Facebook subscribers on day one, and nearly 66 percent on day two. Cause: Third party network provider. Facebook had a major outage in April 2010 as [...]

By: Will Scalable Data Stores Make NoSQL a Non-Starter?: Cloud «

Will Scalable Data Stores Make NoSQL a Non-Starter?: Cloud « — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:53:20 +0000

[...] MongoDB and Riak are maturing fast and gaining in popularity. But they’ve also been the cause of some noteworthy outages as of late. Perhaps these are just growing pains, but try telling that to most [...]

By: Hey Shareholders, Capex Means Cash in the Cloud!: Cloud «

Hey Shareholders, Capex Means Cash in the Cloud!: Cloud « — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 23:28:03 +0000

[...] and Twitter (even Foursquare) so much that it resembles a national crisis among some circles when one of their sites goes down for a few hours. How do they try to avoid these occurrences in the future? Well, they spend some of [...]

By: New Relic Gets Another $10M, Proves SaaS Profitability: Cloud «

New Relic Gets Another $10M, Proves SaaS Profitability: Cloud « — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:35:07 +0000

[...] view helps customers identify problems early and avoid “the thorniest issues,” citing the recent Foursquare outage as a problem that might have been avoided if the company could have been proactive in addressing [...]

By: dkresse

dkresse — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:04:19 +0000

Great article with tips around how to architect these services. However, I think a key point being missed here is TESTING.

Testing solutions exist today that can help these services prepare for demand spikes coming from an ever increasing variety of end user platforms. The testing solutions are agile and can help both proactively identify bottlenecks, as well as help app and service providers more quickly recover from production issues.

A video of one such solution is shown here in the context of scale testing a Couch DB application. http://bit.ly/bi6xpO

By: NoSQL Startup NorthScale Becomes Membase Inc.: Cloud «

NoSQL Startup NorthScale Becomes Membase Inc.: Cloud « — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:05:08 +0000

[...] much to its corporate structure as to its technology. As Phillips points out, sometimes customers want the proverbial throat to choke, even with an open source database. Because Membase Server is the intellectual property and source [...]

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:45:34 +0000

An argument against your theory is that because Facebook is huge, can afford to hire the best and brightest and should not have massive outages. Foursquare is small and can't keep up with their sudden popularity.

By: jasson

jasson — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:53:23 +0000

Here's my take:

Facebook is HUGE and is expected to have issues from time to time.

Foursquare is small and is NOT expected to have massive outages like the one they had.