by | October 7, 2008 · 10:33 am

Our Search Implementation In The News!

InformationWeek did a big story on enterprise search, and used NI as their lead example!  Note all the system info in the article that I fed them. And we’re getting a lot of fun out of Graff’s quote about how it’s easy to sign off on more resources forus, we’re including that in every purchase req now. 🙂

One of the reasons that our FAST enterprise search program has been so successful here is that the programmers and the Web Admins have worked pretty much 50/50 on the platform.  Also, FAST is a great product and has great support (we’re waiting with bated breath to see if Microsoft screws it up; we’ve been with FAST since way way before they got bought), and we have some very visionary search business folks who saw its potential early on.

Nowadays, search is more than it was considered traditionally.  We have a normal “search box”, of course.   But we also run our faceted navigation off search (e.g. our Data Acquisition product line page), pull things like related links and other resources (see resources tab on this page).  Search, in many ways, can be used the way people have used databases in the past.  With some metadata added, a search index is kinda like a big database, highly denormalized for speed, focusing on text search.  In fact, I think there’s a master’s thesis in there somewhere as to when search makes sense vs. when a database makes sense.  Databases make sense with lots of numerical information, but on the Web that’s frankly a fringe use case!   On the Web it’s all about text, from name/address to links to articles to product info…  When we did things like query related links out of a database table, and I mean an oracle database table on a big ass Solaris box, it was painfully slow.  Pulling from search, it’s 15 milliseconds.

As a result, our internal search use is even more killer.  We pull Intranet pages, documents from Notes repositories, data from our Oracle ERP system, files off file shares, etc. all into one place and let people delve through it.  They’ve even implemented “screens” on top of some of the data (mainly because Oracle ERP is painful to use).  Our entire sales force is gaga over it.

Anyway, so yay to modern search technology, yay to FAST, and yay us!

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by | October 6, 2008 · 4:02 pm

No No, You Really DO Want To Use Live Search

It’s been in the news that Microsoft is pushing “rewards programs” for people to use Live Search and the Live Toolbar.  But did you know they’re trying to get your local IT department to do it for you?

Yep, the program’s called the “Search@Work Rewards Program”.  If your IT department puts IE, with Live Search as the default search, and the Live Toolbar installed, and some kind of tracker plugin called the “Search Rewards Client,” on your company PCs, then they get Microsoft service credits!  Yay.  I can only assume my ISP is next.

Here’s the exact service description from Microsoft.  Note that they’re tracking Yahoo and Google ad impressions too!  The rest of it’s “fair enough” at least by usual IT industry standards but that’s kinda shady I think.

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by | September 12, 2008 · 10:51 am

Beware the Deceptive SLA, My Friend

We’re trying to come to an agreement with a SaaS vendor about performance and availability service level agreements (SLAs).  I discussed this topic some in my previous “SaaS Headaches” post.  I thought it would be instructive to show people the standard kind of “defense in depth” that suppliers can have to protect against being held responsible for what they host for you.

We’ve been working on a deal with one specific supplier.  As part of it, they’ll be hosting some images for our site.  There’s a business team primarily responsible for evaluating their functionality etc., we’re just in the mix as the faithful watchdogs of performance and availability for our site.

Round 1 – “What are these SLAs you speak of?”  The vendor offers no SLA.  “Unacceptable,” we tell the project team.  They fret about having to worry about that along with the 100 other details of coming to an agreement with the supplier, but duly go back and squeeze them.  It takes a couple squeezes because the supplier likes to forget about this topic – send a list of five questions with one of them being “SLA,” you get four answers back, ignoring the SLA question.

Round 2 – “Oh, you said ‘SLA’!  Oh, sure, we have one of those.”  We read the SLA and it only commits to their main host being pingable.  Our service could be completely down, and it doesn’t speak to that.  Back to our project team, who now between the business users, procurement agent, and legal guy need more urging to lean on the supplier.  The supplier plays dumb for a while, and then…

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by | August 5, 2008 · 2:21 pm

Cloud Headaches?

The industry is abuzz with people who are freaked out about the outages that Amazon and other cloud vendors have had.  “Amazon S3 Crash Raises Doubts Among Cloud Customers,” says InformationWeek!

This is because people are going into cloud computing with retardedly high expectations.  This year at Velocity, Interop, etc. I’ve seen people just totally in love with cloud computing – Amazon’s specifically but in general as well.  And it’s a good concept for certain applications.  However, it is a computing system just like every other computing system devised previously by man.  And it has, and will have, problems.

Whether you are using in house systems, or a SaaS vendor, or building “in the cloud,” you have the same general concerns.  Am I monitoring my systems?  What is my SLA?  What is my recourse if my system is not hitting it?  What’s my DR plan?

SaaS is a special case of cloud computing in general.  And if you’re a company relying on it, when you contract with a SaaS vendor you get SLAs established and figure out what the remedy is if they breach it.  If you are going into a relationship where you are just paying money for a cloud VM, storage, etc. and there is no enforceable SLA in the relationship, then you need to build the risk of likely and unremediable outages into your business plan.

I hate to break it to you, but the IT people working at Amazon, Google, etc. are not all that smarter than the IT people working with you.  So an unjustified faith in a SaaS or cloud vendor – “Oh, it’s Amazon, I’m sure they’ll never have an outage of any sort – either across their entire system or localized to my part of it – and if they do I’m sure the $100/month I’m paying them will cause them to give a damn about me” – is an unreasonable expectation on its face.

Clouds and cloud vendors are a good innovation.  But they’re like every other computing innovation and vendor selling it to you.  They’ll have bugs and failures.  But treating them as if they won’t is a failure on your part, not theirs.

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by | July 15, 2008 · 3:58 pm

SaaS Headaches

There’s a lot of promise in the new SaaS (software as a service; what used to be called ASPs, or Application Service providers, till Microsoft crapped all over that acronym) and newer PaaS (platform as a service) spaces (and look for a steady stream of new “aaS”es to come).  However, there are a lot of gotchas in signing on with a SaaS vendor.  You’d like to be able to believe that they have decent performance, uptime, security, etc., especially after they tell you “Oh, all kinds of big companies use us; Dell, IBM…”  This is exacerbated by SaaS often being an “end run” around IT in the enterprise, so naive users can get sold a bill of goods without proper technical oversight.  SaaS is a big buzzword now, and there are a lot of startups springing up that do not necessarily have experience running large scale sites.  Think about how many MMORPG games still get scuttled due to poor operational performance.  SaaS is the same.

Here’s some things to keep in mind when selecting a SaaS vendor, laced with real life horror stories from our experiences.

1.  Performance/Availability.  Set a hard performance/availability SLA in the contract.  Many vendors won’t even have an SLA clause, or they’ll have one that says “99.9% uptime!” without any remedy clause for what if they don’t hit that.  You want a clear SLA with a clear measurement method and clear “money back” if they don’t hit it.  We use a 2 second global performance SLA as measured by a Keynote Global 35 monitor.  But the SLA isn’t the whole story – you are counting on these people to accomplish your goals.

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by | July 11, 2008 · 3:51 pm

Optimizing Web Performance with AOL Pagetest

Dave Artz has put together a simple Webcast tutorial on how to use webpagetest.org to measure and fix up your Web site.  If all this talk about Web performance is a bit overwhelming, it’s a great novice tutorial.  He walks through the entire process visually and explains each metric.  Great job Dave!

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by | July 2, 2008 · 4:04 pm

Oracle + BEA = ?

We use Oracle Application Server as our Java app server at NI. Yeah, yeah, I’ll wait till you stop laughing.

Why not JBoss or WebLogic or WebSphere? Well, a couple reasons. We made the decision five years ago, and JBoss wasn’t solid then, and we needed J2EE support so plain Tomcat wasn’t enough. And we’re a huge Oracle shop and figured that if we were using the same app server on the Web and our ERP tiers there’d be leverage in terms of developer knowledge etc.  Would we make that same decision today? I’m not sure about that (I can hear my team members shouting “hell no” over the cube walls).  Although since we’ve also gone with Oracle’s SOA suite for ESB and BPEL it would be harder to switch. But still tempting – Oracle has done a horrible job in getting their app server supported by other vendors. Every time we buy something and look at the supported app server section of their support matrix, and we ask “What about Oracle’s OAS?” we get expressions of mixed horror and pity from the supplier. (I liked it when the Chinese technical guy from one eComm vendor we had in responded to this question with, “You know, the Tomcat is good, and free! Maybe you use that!”)

Anyway, Oracle bought BEA a while back, which got keen interest from us. Stay with Oracle *and* use a good app server that other people support?  Tempting!  But Oracle’s been farting around for six months without coming out with a statement on what this will mean for the products. Oracle’s finally done a Webcast describing their strategy. Well, it’s half marketing and a celebration of how many million dollars they have. But there’s also a lot of product strategy in there. I’ll sum it up for you because the damn webcast is nearly two hours long, and I don’t want other people to have to waste that much time on it. Unless you like to hear someone go on about “strategic clarity” and “customer profiles,” in which case this is two hours of bliss for you and you should watch it.  Although I also had the stream break a bunch of times while watching.  Who the heck uses RealPlayer any more?  Anyway, here’s a list of the interesting product facts from the Webcast.  Some are marked with their timestamp if you want to fast forward to them and see more.

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by | June 25, 2008 · 9:41 pm

Velocity 2008 Conference Experience Wrapup

Well, I’m finally home with a spare minute to write. I and the two guys who went to the conference with me (Peco and Robert) got a lot out of it. I apologize for the brevity of style of the conference writeups, but they were notes taken on a precariously balanced laptop, under bad network and power conditions, while I was also trying to get around and participate meaningfully in a very fast-paced event. I’ve gone back and tried to soften them a little bit, but there’s no rest for the wicked. You can access many of the slides for the sessions here.

The conference was quite a success. Everyone we spoke to was enthusiastic about the people and information there. O’Reilly is happy because attendance was above their expectations, and it looks like it’s been expanded to 3 days next year, which is good – it was *so* session packed and fast paced I didn’t get to talk to all the suppliers I wanted in the dealer room and at times it felt like the Bataan death march. The first day we barely had time to grab a fast food dinner, and we often found ourselves hungry and hurrying. We enjoyed talking with the people there, but it seemed less conversational than other conventions – maybe because of the pace, maybe because half the people there were from the area and thus needed to scamper off to work/home and were therefore not into small talk.

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by | June 24, 2008 · 7:28 pm

The Velocity 2008 Conference Experience – Part VII

We’ve reached the last couple sessions at Velocity 2008. Read me! Love me!

We hear about Capacity Planning with John Allspaw of Flickr. He says: No benchmarks! Use real production data. (How? We had to develop a program called WebReplay to do this because no one had anything. We’re open sourcing it soon, stay tuned.)

Use “safety factors” (from traditional engineering). Aka a reserve, overhead, etc.

They use squid a bunch. At NI we’ve been looking at Oracle’s WebCache – mainly because it supports ESIs and we’re thinking that may be a good way to go. There’s a half assed ESI plugin for squid but we hear it doesn’t work; apparently Zope paid for ESI support in squid 3.0 but no traction on that in 4 years best as we can tell. But I’d be happy not to spend the money.

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by | June 24, 2008 · 5:08 pm

The Velocity 2008 Conference Experience – Part VI

After a tasty pseudo-Asian hotel lunch (though about anything would be tasty by now!), we move into the final stretch of afternoon sessions for Velocity. Everyone seems in a good mood after the interesting demos in the morning and the general success of the conference.

First, it’s the eagerly awaited Even Faster Web Sites. Steve Souders, previously Yahoo! performance guru and now Google performance guru, has another set of recommendations regarding Web performance. His previous book with its 14 rules and the Firebug plugin, YSlow, that supported it, are one of the things that really got us hooked deeply into the Web performance space.

First, he reviews why front end performance is so important. In the steady state, 80-90% of your average page’s load time the user sees is time after the server has spit it out. “Network time.” Optimizing your code speed is therefore a smaller area of improvement than optimizing the front end. And it can be improved, often in simple ways.

Man, there’s a wide variance in how people’s pages perform with a primed cache – from no benefit (most of the Alexa top 10) to incredible benefit (Google and MS live Search results pages). Anyway, Steve developed his original 14 best practices for optimizing front end performance, and then built YSlow to measure them.

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