Sven Hammar

On Monday, Amazon Web Services — the leading provider of cloud services — suffered an outage, and as a result, a long list of well-known and popular websites went dark. According to Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard, the outage started out as degraded performance of a small number of Elastic Bloc Store (EBS) storage units in the US-EAST-1 Region, then evolved to include problems with the Relational Database Service and Elastic Beanstalk as well. WEBSITE DOWN: AWS outage takes down Reddit and other popular sites The only surprising thing about this AWS outage was that anyone was surprised by it. It wasn’t the first time AWS had a major outage or problems with this data center. If you remember, back in June a line of powerful thunderstorms knocked the power out at a major Amazon hosting center. The backup generator failed, then the software failed, and, well, you know t... (more)

2013: The Year of Application Optimization for the Device-Driven Internet

For the past few years, our friends at VMblog.com have run an annual prediction series forecasting the trends most likely to drive adoption of cloud and virtualization technologies in the upcoming year. This is the second year in a row that they’ve invited me to contribute, and I thought long and hard about the assignment. After a deep gaze into my crystal ball, a deliberate shuffle of the tarot cards, and much careful contemplation, I settled on six major predictions, six changes to how solution providers and organizations will approach performance management in 2013. Some of t... (more)

Twitter’s Performance Metrics During the Political Conventions

While all eyes were on Tampa, Fla. and Charlotte, N.C. these last two weeks for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, we had our eyes, and monitors, on Twitter to see if and how these events impacted Twitter’s website performance. As is the case with most big news events today, people took to Twitter in a big way for real-time information and broke some records in the process. After the Republican National Convention (RNC) concluded last week, Twitter reported that 4 million tweets were sent out in total about the RNC. Following the conclusion of President Obama’s s... (more)

Load Testing to Detect Advanced Persistent Threats

I’ve written before about how capacity planning and load testing tools can help companies prepare for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, but we’ve begun to see a new class of attacks emerge, called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), whose aim is much more sinister than a slow response time or “page not found” error. What is an Advanced Persistent Threat? The intentions behind APT are all about espionage — not just state-sponsored espionage but also extensive and well-organized industrial espionage. APT is not about any particular technology or technique. The actual a... (more)

Three Web Performance Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Could you imagine NASA sending a rocket into space without testing it first? What about a racing team putting a brand new car on the track without taking it for a few laps to test the handling and stability? It seems to me that testing is inherent in every technical field — except for website development that is. Too often we see websites where it’s clear that design was the main priority, while testing the site’s functionality and user experience was just an afterthought. What you’re left with is a great looking website that feels like it is being sent over the Internet via car... (more)