I meet new people all the time. It’s a way of life in New York. One of the first questions new people ask each other is “What do you do?”. It begins to sound like a cliche after a while, but it can also provide endless fascinating discussions as there are so many people with different professions in New York. Some choose a titled answer “i’m an investment banker”, “I’m an emcee”, “I’m an executive recruiter”. I find for “Web Scalability Consultant” or “Web Operations Expert” this only leaves confused looks.
A Plumber By Another Name
The solution of course is to tell a good story. Stories illustrate what titles and crusty vernacular cannot. I’ve used analogies to surgeons or mechanics, of course they all operate on something people can related to in front of them. People or vehicles we use everyday. Of course with the internet, there is a huge hidden infrastructure that most people don’t see everyday. They may vaguely know it’s there, but it’s still hidden out of site.
That’s why I think plumbing provides such an apt visual. As it turns out the internet is built with countless data pipes both large and small, coming into your home or laying across the bottom of the transatlantic ocean. These pipes plug into routers, high speed traffic lights and traffic cops. Ultimately they feed into datacenters, huge rooms filled with racks of computers, holding your websites crown jewels. Therein contains the images and status updates from your facebook profile, your banking transactions from your personal bank account or credit card, your netflix movie stream, or the email you sent via gmail. Even your instant messaging stream, or the data from your favorite iphone app are all stored and retrieved from here.
Amazon Outage
The recent Amazon outage has been high profile enough that a lot of folks who don’t follow the latest trends in web operations, devops, and datacenter automation still heard about this event. Turns out it’s had a silver lining for Amazon cause now everyone is scrutinizing how many sites actually rely on this goliath of a hosting provider.
As it turns out the root of the amazon outage was indeed a plumbing problem. Amazon has shown rather high transparency publishing intimate details of the problem and it’s resolution. Read more.
A misconfigured network cascaded through the system creating countless failures. If you imagine water repairs being done in a large New York City building, they often ask tenants to turn off their water, so they won’t all come on at the same time when service is restored. SImilarly intricate problems complicated the Amazon effort, slowing down attempts to restore everything after the incident. I wrote at length about the outage if you’re interested, read more.
BOOK REVIEW: Game-Based Marketing by Zicherman & Linder
There are so many new books coming out all the time, it’s tough to sift and find the good ones. Anyone with a website as their storefront, whether they are a product company or a services company, can gain from reading this book.
From leaderboards to frequent flyer programs, badges and more this book is full of real-world examples where game-based principles are put into action. On the internet where attention is a rarer and rarer commodity, these concepts will surely make a big difference to your business.