2008
Web Operations:
From Cost Center
to Competitive
Advantage
By Allan Alter and the O’Reilly Radar Team
Contents
Web Operations: From Cost Center to
Competative Advantage ...1
What is Web Operations? ...2
Operations = Availability ...3
Performance = Response ...3
Web Operations and Business ...3
Steve Souders’ 14 rules for high performance websites .6 Web Operations and Performance: Business Principles ..7
Case Study: Flickr ... 12
Timeline: Operations at Flickr ... 13
Case Study: iLike ... 14
Best Practices ... 15
Conclusion ... 21
Appendix: The Technologies of Web Operations ... 22
Platforms and Platform Architectures ... 22
Languages, Tools and Frameworks ... 23
Operations and Performance Services ... 25
Optimization Tools, Techniques, and Technologies ... 25
1 : Web Operations: From Cost Center to Competitive Advantage
conducts business on the web—are recognizing that reliable web operations and fast website performance are essential. With the Web now the sales channel most frequently used by U.S. companies, serious money is at stake: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have found a lag of half a second or less can have a major impact on revenues and the number of searches. As Jesse Robbins, an O’Reilly Radar blogger and website availability expert, says, “You only make money when your website is up. The more available and the faster your website, the more revenue-generating pages a customer can view in the same amount of time, and the happier the customer will be.” (Robbins was responsible for website availability at Amazon.com, where his title was “Master of Disaster.“)
Still, most executives don’t fully understand all the potential business benefits of a high performance, high uptime website—and the hit their business can take if they neglect web operations. Nor do they know enough about the basic principles, technologies, and manage-ment practices that separate well-run sites from the also-rans. These principles sometimes require new ways of thinking—especially about how to approach website downtime and “failure.” This report, written for business executives and managers at online businesses (or any company with a commercial website), provides a guide to understanding what web operations means, the business opportunities and risks it presents, and the best practices for operating and managing a mission-critical site.
Web Operations:
From Cost Center to Competitive Advantage
by Allan Alter and the O’Reilly Radar Team
W
hen people say the Web has changed how we work, they tend to think about how people buy and sell products, col-laborate and share information with co-workers, or all the new kinds of businesses that have emerged. What they often overlook is that the Web has changed something else that’s fundamental to every business—execution.Execution, say Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan in their book by that name, is the “discipline of getting things done…the missing link between aspirations and results.” It’s understanding how to operate a business in an efficient, effective, and reliable way, knowing how to meet the expectations of your customers so your organi-zation can meet the expectations of management and investors. In an online business—and nearly every busi-ness is an online busibusi-ness today—execution must include the discipline of operating websites. Only, “include” doesn’t go far enough. An online business must think of the website as one of the most important parts of a company’s operations. It’s just that critical.
Customers don’t care about the operational, behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on, such as how many servers support a site, server automation, or HTML coding. But they do care about whether the site keeps crashing, it takes a long time to download pages, or the features on the site hang up. That’s why smart executives at all Internet companies—in fact, any organization that
What is Web Operations?
“Operations” has long referred to the day-in, day-out processes of a business. Chief operating officers run their organizations’ day-to-day activities; in banking, “opera-tions” refers to running branches and processing checks or transactions. Likewise, the IT profession has been using “operations” for decades to describe running and maintaining mainframes, servers, and data centers. But the phrase “web operations” is much newer. Its earliest use dates back to 2003, when the phrase appeared as part of the name of the Internet Web Ops conference. You still won’t find many companies with a function
known as the web operations department. Web opera-tions remains an ill-defined and even controversial term: just as the phrase “classical music” means both music specifically from the era of Haydn and Mozart, and the entire European concert music tradition from
Monteverdi to Stockhausen, web operations sometimes refers only to running and maintaining websites, and at other times serves as an umbrella term that also encom-passes the field known as “web performance.” In this report, we’ll use the phrase web operations in its broader sense.
Job Titles in Web Operations: One indication of just how new the term “web operations” and “web performance” still is: neither phrase appeared in online job postings for these positions between November 2007 and April 2008.
3 : Web Operations: From Cost Center to Competitive Advantage
Operations = Availability
Theo Schlossnagle, an expert on building scalable, high performing websites and CEO of OmniTI Computer Consulting Inc., is not a fan of the phrase “web opera-tions”; he prefers terms that give a tip of the hat to the technical skills required to run a website, such as “site architects” and “site reliability engineers.” But he does have a clear definition of “web operations” in its narrow sense: it’s “how I put the website in place, how I keep it going, how I meet the demand (if demand rises above capacity), or not eat my shorts in costs (if demand is less than capacity). As business requirements change and mutate, it’s making sure what you have in place still works well.”
Web operations focuses on availability—keeping sitesup and running. Availability includes reliability: the capability to consistently download not just web pages, but the features on those pages (e.g., search, video, account information, online purchasing, chat, etc). To achieve reliability, web operations personnel set up and maintain their sites’ hardware, software, storage, and network infrastructure. They also ensure scalability as demand for the site increases, by designing an infrastruc-ture that can grow and by preparing for the fuinfrastruc-ture through capacity planning. Availability also encom-passes recovery: the ability to get a website back up should the site, or any individual feature, fail to be avail-able. Part of the job of running a website is setting up redundant systems and even data centers that can take over when equipment fails, and creating plans to get the site back online when it crashes.
Performance = Response
While web operations and availability focuses on the servers, web performance concentrates on what the user sees. “It’s how we deliver our product as quickly as pos-sible and provide a good user experience,” is the succinct definition by Google technical staff member Steve Souders, author of High Performance Websites, creator of the YSlow tool for analyzing web performance, and Yahoo’s former Chief Performance Yahoo!
Web performance focuses primarily on response time:
the length of time it take to download a web page. Improving performance involves optimizing the files, instructions, and components that make up a web page. But the definition of performance includes efficiency, too: optimizing hardware, data centers, and networking to serve web pages at maximal speed with minimal resources.