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Cloud failures: It’s not if, it’s when

Apple is sporting an nasty black eye, and the shiner isn’t only because iPad sales are slipping – with a 14% year-on-year decline reported. This time, it’s because QoS on the company’s cloud servers is ugly, ugly, ugly.

As of my writing (on Thursday, July 25), Apple’s developer portal has been offline for days. As you can see on the dashboard, just about everything is down. If you go to a dev center, you see this message:

We apologize for the significant inconvenience caused by our developer website downtime. We’ve been working around the clock to overhaul our developer systems, update our server software, and rebuild our entire database. While we complete the work to bring our systems back online, we want to share the latest with you.

We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We’ll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we’ve created a status page to display the availability of our systems.

As you may have read elsewhere, the reason for the outage is apparently a researcher found a massive security hole in the App dev center system. To prevent the flaw from being exploited, Apple took the entire system down – on July 18. That’s right, it’s been over a week.

Ouch.

And then, today, July 25, there are reports that the authentication server needed to set up new iPhone accounts is offline. Apple’s IT department certainly isn’t looking too savvy right now – and perhaps this points to bigger challenges within the company’s spending priorities.

However, before anyone piles onto Apple, bear in mind that service outages are not uncommon, especially in the cloud. Certainly, they are not new; I’ve written about them before, such as in 2008’s “When the cloud was good, it was very very good, but when it was bad, it was horrid” and 2011’s “Skynet didn’t take down Amazon Web Services.”

Cloud failure is not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. When huge corporations like Amazon and Apple can suffer these sorts of outages, anyone can, no matter how big.

What’s the game plan? Do you have a fail-over strategy to spool up a backup provider? Do you have messaging ready for your customers and partners? Alternatives to suggest?

I have no idea how much money Apple is losing due to these outages – or how much its developer partners and customers are affected. Apple, however, is big enough to handle the hit. How about you?

Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick
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The developer is king

“You should double your top line revenue by making your products more awesome, not by doubling the size of your sales department.”

That was one of the insights shared during a technology roundtable held last July 16 in San Francisco. Called “The Developer is King,” the discussion was moderated by Dan Dodge of Google Ventures, formerly a startup evangelist at Microsoft and engineer at such diverse firms at AltaVista, Napster and Groove Networks. Also on the panel: John Collison, founder of online payment site Stripe; Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub; Suhail Doshi, co-founder of Web analytics firm MixPanel; and Lew Cirne, founder of app monitoring firm New Relic.

The atmosphere around the panel was filled with pithy aphorisms about why so many developers are succeeding as entrepreneurs. For example, “developer aren’t just techies, they are artists who creating things,” and “a good startup founder is someone who doesn’t live only to write code, but who likes to solve problems.”

What made this conversation particularly interesting is that not only are these founders all developers, but their customers are also developers. The panelists offered some true words of wisdom for anyone targeting developers:

• Developers are hard to please. You have to build products that just work — you can’t create success through whiz-bang marketing.

• Developers will see your product and think they can build it themselves. It’s often not hard to duplicate your product. So you have to focus on the customers, ecosystem and simplicity.

• If you are building a commercial offering atop open source software, show that you help developers get their work done more easily than the open source version.

• Tools are quite viral; developers are great at telling their friends what works for them — and what doesn’t work for them.

• Focus on the initial user experience, and make customers more productive immediately. Contrast your offering with big platforms that require a lot of work to install, configure, train and use before the customer sees any benefit.

• The way to innovate is to try lots of things – and create a culture that tolerates failure.

• When hiring, a cultural fit beats anything on the resume. You can teach skills – you can’t teach character.

• Don’t set out to build a company; instead, start out creating a solution to a real problem, and then grow that into a business.

• Don’t get hung up on analyst estimates of market size. Create markets, don’t pursue them.

and my favorite,

• You shouldn’t build a company by focusing on a current fad or gold rush. Rather, figure out where people are frustrated or having problems. Make something that people want. Figure out how to make people happy.

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Saying farewell to the mouse-man, Douglas Engelbart

Dr. Douglas Engelbart, who passed away on July 2, was best known as the inventor of the computer mouse. While Dr. Engelbart was the brains behind many revolutionary ideas, his demonstration of a word processor using a mouse in 1968 paved the way for the graphical user interfaces in Xerox’s Alto (1973), Apple’s Lisa (1979) and Macintosh (1984), Microsoft’s Windows (1985) and IBM’s OS/2 Presentation Manager (1988).

Future generations may regard the mouse as a transitional technology. Certainly the touch interface, popularized in the iPad, Android tablets and Windows 8, are making a dent in the need for the mouse — though my Microsoft Surface Pro is far easier to use with a mouse, in addition to the touch screen.

Voice recognition is also making powerful strides. When voice is combined with a touch screen, it’s possible to envision the post-WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing Devices) mobile-style user experience surpassing mouse-driven systems.

Dr. Engelbart, who was recently fêted in Silicon Valley, was 88. Here are some links to help us gain more insight into his vision:

Obituary in the New York Times, by John Markoff.

“The Mother of All Demos” on 1968. Specifically, see clips 3 and 12 where Dr. Engelbart edits documents with a mouse.

A thoughtful essay about Dr. Engelbart’s career, by Tom Foremski.

I never had the honor of meeting Dr. Engelbart. There was a special event commemorating his accomplishments at Stanford Research Institute in 2008, but unfortunately I was traveling.

It’s remarkable for one person to change the world in such a significant way – and so fast. Dr. Engelbart and his team invented not only the mouse, but also personal computing as we know it today. It is striking how that 1968 demo resembles desktop and notebook computing circa 2013. Not bad. Not bad at all. May his memory be a blessing.

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Test Early, Test Often

Quality Assurance. Testing. No matter what you call it – and of course, there are subtle distinctions between testing and QA – the discipline is essential for successfully creating professional-grade software.

Sure, a one-person shop or a small consultancy might get away without having formal test teams or serious QA policies. Most of us can’t afford to work that way. The cost of software failure, to us and to our customers, can be huge in so many ways.

SD Times and sdtimes.com recently asked readers about test and QA in a research study. Here are some of the results; how well do the answers match your organization’s profile?

Does your organization have separate development and test teams? (Please check one only)

Yes, all development teams and test/QA teams are separate 35.9%
Some development and test/QA teams are separate, some are integrated 33.4%
All test and development teams are integrated 27.4%
Don’t know 3.3%

If any of the test/QA teams in your organization are separate, where do those test teams report? (Please check all that apply)

To the development team 16.2%
To a development manager, director, or VP of development 33.8%
To an IT manager not managing development 22.2%
To a software architect or project leader on a particular project 19.7%
To the CIO/CTO 9.2%
To line of business managers 14.8%
Don’t know 8.1%

What background do your test/QA managers and directors typically have? (Please check all that apply)

Development 20.3%
Test/QA only 28.9%
Development and test/QA 48.9%
General IT background 31.7%
General management background 18.5%
No particular background – we train them from scratch 14.2%

Does your company outsource any of its software quality assurance or testing? (Please check one only)

Yes, all of it 3.7%
Yes, some of it 32.3%
No, none of it 58.1%
Don’t know 5.9%

Who is responsible for internally-developed application performance testing and monitoring in your company? (Please check all that apply)

Software/Application Developers 68.2%
Software/Application Development Management 54.2%
Testers 52.3%
Testing Management 43.9%
Systems administrators 34.9%
IT top management (development) (VP or above) 29.3%
Networking personnel 25.2%
IT top management (non-development) (VP or above) 24.6%
Line-of-business management 21.5%
Consultants 20.2%
Service providers 19.0%
Networking management 18.1%

What is the state of software security testing at your company? (Please check all that apply)

Software security is checked by the developers 41.2%
Software security is checked by the test/QA team 31.6%
Software security is tested by a separate security team 26.9%
Software security testing is done for Web applications 25.7%
Software security is checked by the IT/networking department 25.4%
Software security testing is done for in-house applications 24.1%
Software security testing is done for public-facing applications 21.7%
We don’t have a specific security testing process 20.4%
Software security is checked by contractors 9.3%
Software security testing is not our responsibility 3.1%

At what stage is your company, or companies that you consult, using the cloud for software testing? (Please check one only)

No plans to use the cloud for software testing 42.3%
We are studying the technology but have not started yet 21.2%
We are experimenting with using the cloud for software testing 16.0%
We are using the cloud for software testing on a routine basis 10.7%
Don’t know 9.8%

Lots of good data here!

Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick