The case against Apple isn’t difficult to make, as even die-hard Apple lovers will admit if you speak in a whisper or ask them after they’ve had a few drinks. As Gibson notes, there is the ongoing usability train wreck that is iTunes, which even long-time Apple users find has a habit of suddenly deleting music and other content with no warning and is actively user-hostile. Then there are social elements such as Ping and Game Center, which are virtual ghost towns (Ping was recently euthanized) and the grand-daddy of them all — the beast previously known as .Mac and MobileMe, now known as iCloud.

As Gibson argues, the ability to offer cloud-based services (which are really just web services with a fancier name) is becoming increasingly important for companies like Apple and Google, as they try to deepen their relationship with users. And while Google has always lagged behind Apple when it comes to the design and usability of its hardware, it has always had a significant lead in the web-services department. Compare iCloud mail to Gmail, or iTunes to Google Play, and Apple is the one that comes out looking the worst, not Google. As Gibson puts it, quoting a friend:

“Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services. I’m a long-time Mac user and a diehard Apple fan, and even I will admit that Apple’s approach to the web has been a clusterf***… Almost anything Apple does which involves the internet is a mess.”

Apple doesn’t really understand the social web

In an attempt to bolster its social features in the wake of the disaster that was Ping, Apple signed a partnership with Twitter that made the service the social plumbing inside virtually all of Apple’s products (and has since signed a similar arrangement with Facebook). Given that it already has that kind of relationship, there seems to be little rationale for Apple to acquire Twitter outright — as financial columnist Barry Ritholtz and others have argued in the past.

But Gibson point isn’t that Apple should buy Twitter to make itself more social. He says it should do so because Twitter understands how to build, run and grow a large-scale web service that handles hundreds of thousands of interactions every minute — something that he seems to believe is more or less impossible for Apple to do on its own. As he describes it:

“Not only does Twitter use some of the most advanced web technology, they invented it… Apple should buy Twitter not for its social network, but for its talent and technology. That talent and technology could undoubtedly help bring Apple and iCloud into the 21st century. The social network is basically an added bonus.”

Having advanced his theory, Gibson then goes on to list all the reasons why it probably won’t happen, including the fact that Twitter probably wants to stay independent and try to justify its estimated $10-billion market value, and Apple is “too in denial about the failings of its antiquated approach to the web to consider dropping such a huge amount of money.” As it becomes more and more of a media company, Twitter is also likely to lose some of the engineering talent that would make it worth acquiring, Gibson says (something he argues is already happening).

That said, it’s an interesting idea. There is no question that Apple’s biggest shortcomings lie in the area of web services, and there is no sign of it attacking that problem in any real way, although some Apple fans are hoping design guru Jony Ive will be able to help now that he is taking over responsibility for the usability of all of Apple’s products, as opposed to just the hardware. Merging cultures is never easy, but Twitter may be the closest thing to a plug-and-play solution for the company — unless of course Apple wants to reach for the stars and make a takeover bid for Google itself.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Mr Pics / Shutterstock.com

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In a talk at the Surge Conference in Baltimore, Md., Pedro Canahuati, director of production engineering and site reliability at Facebook, explained how the social network keeps the site available, reliable and efficient.

Scale smart not not just fast.

Adding servers is essential to keeping Facebook available to the rapidly growing user base, but to remain reliable for the long term, Facebook needed a system that could scale up in a hurry if it needed to add tens of thousands of servers at a time. In August 2009 when Canahuati arrived at Facebook, he said the site spent seven weeks to get 10,000 servers into production once they were plugged in. Thanks to the development of Triforce, it now takes seven days to get the site running on 10,000 servers. But in Canahuati’s opinion, the rate of getting software on servers is still too slow, so there are two Facebook employees still working on making that process faster.

Building a tool itself saves Facebook the headache of dealing with open source code that might not be able to hack the strain of its infrastructure demands, while also keeping Facebook from paying a vendor a license fee that could become astronomical as it scaled. Understanding the process of building the tools to keep the site’s infrastructure up and running, and the impact that process plays on the ultimate goal of reliability, is where Facebook has carved out another advantage that other large web services could learn from.

Like his peers at Pinterest, Canahuati stressed that when you are at massive scale, you need to keep it simple.

Make it easy to see what’s wrong.

He also added a few more tenets, including “instrument your world.” He explained how Facbeook collects a lot of data across many of its systems in order to understand how the different services that comprise the site are performing and interacting. Tools such as Scuba and Claspin are examples of this effort to take complex operational data and make it easy to understand.

“Smart visualizations are often overlooked,” said Canahuati, but scanning data at a glance and then acting quickly on it is an essential ingredient for keeping systems up and running.

Automation can be a dream — or a nightmare.

One of Facebook’s secrets to scale is automation, but automation can create its own problems. At its worst, one could create a system that automatically brings down the whole site. Elsewhere, automation can mask a more systemic problem.

However, a more persistent worry is that engineers and operations people working to automate certain actions might think they’re coding themselves out of a job. To alleviate those fears, Canahuati says Facebook has implemented several strategies that boil down into keeping a lean team works on multiple jobs and problems. This ensures that when automation solves one problem, there’s another one waiting in the wings to be solved, and also sets the expectation that employees are responsible for the whole site broadly and not just one tool set.

This approach is carried all the way to the way Facebook manages and hires its employees. It expects the engineering team that builds Facebook products to be aware of the operations side of things and build tools that help the operations team out. Operations employees are expected to be able to code and work with the engineering teams. “The software guys who build the code must take ownership for it working on a big system at scale,” Canahuati said.

But these operationally aware engineering teams and engineering-aware operational teams must have buy in at the top because people who code generally cost more, so hiring operational team members who code requires a bigger budget.

The tactic seems to work for Facebook, which is clearly trying to build a culture of responsibility and effectiveness that can scale the same way its servers do. Hence its continued release of tools that others can use to monitor their own giant deployments, as well as its operational slogan: “Fix more, whine less.”

In many ways, Canahuati’s points are good policies for any corporate culture today. Traits such as communication between teams, blame avoidance and employees that think strategically instead of just about their skillsets are helpful no matter how many servers you have.

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The Surge Conference is billed as a conference about scalability, and is one of the cooler and nerdier events on the East Coast for those trying to build big websites and services. The premise of the conference is to get engineers onstage talking about times they have failed and what they learned from it. Engineers from Facebook, Pinterest and Yammer are giving talks. So it attracts a cluster of engineers that Apple would love to have working on its own cloud services, which have so far struggled to scale to the hundred of millions of dedicated users the company has.

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That’s a lot of money for a storage startup, especially one that’s pursuing the appliance model in an era of build-it-yourself- commodity hardware, but investors are so confident the round was “massively oversubscribed,” and the valuation led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to hold up the financing while it investigated the round, confirmed Nutanix President and CEO Dheeraj Pandey.

So what has investors so excited? Nutanix’s appliance allows companies to do two things that are important to companies on the leading edge of the scale out and virtualization shift: it allows companies to eliminate separate storage networks by virtualizing them and allows companies to move their storage closer to their compute power, which speeds up a company’s applications or response times. As my colleague Derrick Harris wrote in April of 2011 when Nutanix launched:

The key to Nutanix is virtualization, which provides the abstraction and the additional storage connections necessary to give Nutanix the performance edge it claims. The company is big on solid-state drives for performance and consolidation, but Pandey says legacy storage systems are limited to the amount of SSDs they can handle. With a virtualized computing layer, however, each virtual server and each physical node provide the requisite housing and connection to an additional SSD. The Nutanix appliance combines both SSDs and hard disk drives to achieve maximum levels of performance and affordability, Pandey said.

Nutanix has proved that customers want its appliances, noting that it has shipped 150 systems, including 600 servers attached with more than 3.3 PBs of spindle and Fusion-io storage. The additional money gives it the wherewithal to continue selling its product to more and more companies, likely with the aim for going public in the not-too-distant future.

“This round takes us to $50 million-plus in the bank, and that means we can build a company of lasting value,” said Pandey. “That’s why Goldman is involved.” Of course, when I asked Pandey about the timing of the IPO he declined to speculate.

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Online bra retailer True&Co, which launched last week using a predictive model to help women find the perfect bra without ever visiting a store, is having trouble delivering its products. The site sent emails to people who have already ordered citing an “overwhelming response,” and promising to notify users of a delivery window.

Meanwhile, people trying to order bras on Thursday were unable to, and received an error message. As the Internet crosses over into the real world, it’s not just websites that have to be prepared for a launch, but the entire supply chain. I’ve reached out to True&Co for details, and will update with any response, but here’s what we know.

The company, which offered shoppers a five-question quiz that helped them find the perfect bra without ever having to experience a tape measure, launched on May 30 at the D Conference. I covered the launch and also ordered five bras just to see if a predictive model could do what people in a store could not. After ordering I received a flurry of emails welcoming me to the site, letting me know the online store was opening soon, and finally, one confirming my order. My credit card was charged a $45 fee as part of my order the following day.

But yesterday, after hearing nothing from the company for a week, I received the following message via email:

Since we launched last week, we’ve received an overwhelming response from all of you. We’ve been working hard to schedule a delivery window for your orders, and you will receive an email next week letting you know which delivery window you belong to.

Today, when a colleague tried to order from the site, she had her original login and password information rejected, and when she tried to request her password, it failed. After she went back to her welcome email from the launch day, she made it into the site and was able to select her bras and begin checking out. However, after she entered her credit card info, she got the following error message:

It’s unclear what the issue is holding up deliveries for True&Co. Online retailing is hard. The company sources its own bras from “boutique manufacturers,” as the founders told me in our original interview. Perhaps those manufacturers couldn’t keep up with demand. Even Apple has encountered that problem. Or maybe the bras are there, but the people to sort and pack them are not.

So far, the moral here is that it may be easy (or at least easier) to scale a business that is entirely online, and hard to scale a business that has to deal with real-world goods. But as technology continues to cross over into the mainstream and improve more mundane aspects of our lives, startups may have to take a lesson from True&Co. — if we can discover what’s holding them up.

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Network engineers from Yahoo, Facebook, PayPal and Zynga told the GigaOM Structure conference that startups and other companies need to think about how they’re going to scale their information infrastructure as they grow. However, the panel said that companies also need to recognize that their predictions will probably be wrong, and look at using cloud computing services to make it easier to adapt that infrastructure later.

Mark Williams, vice-president of network operations for Zynga, said that one of the things cloud computing has done is to provide a relatively manageable number of infrastructure pieces — whether it’s servers, software or a combination of the two — that a company can put together to scale quickly. Zynga, for example, doesn’t know what kind of demand or traffic a new game will produce when it first launches, so the company focuses on having a suite of infrastructure pieces “and then the network team works with the developers and we can swap those pieces out if we need to, and experiment in real time to solve those challenges.”

Facebook’s VP of technical operations, Jonathan Heiliger, said one thing the company has found as it’s grown to more than 400 million users is that whenever it predicts that demand for a new feature or service will be really high, it isn’t, and “when we predict it will be really low, it turns out to be really high.” Jay Parikh, the director of engineering at the social network, said one thing the company does is to try new features with a small group of users “so we can see what adoption rates are like, and then to extrapolate to what it’s going to be like when you turn it on across 400 million users.”

Todd Papaioannou, VP of cloud infrastructure at Yahoo, said that people like to say scaling problems are good problems to have, since it means a company is growing. But companies need to try and think about scaling issues as early as possible when they’re building their systems, “because you’re going to be stuck with them for a long time,” and it’s going to be very difficult and very painful to go back and re-architect later.

Meanwhile, PayPal’s VP of customer quality, Matthew Mengerink, said that companies also need to focus on developing a business model that allows for such incorrect predictions, because they will happen and companies will have to re-architect their infrastructure. “You can’t predict the future or what yo’ure going to need,” he said, and if you don’t spend time on your business model, “you won’t have a scale problem because you won’t have any customers.”

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