The Accelerate HR Blog
Enterprise applications: how do you cope when the web can't? (Sat Dec 22 2007)
You probably remember with affection the good old days of the web when it took 2 minutes to open a page. Well grieve not, because that's exactly where we're heading again, if a report from the US-based Nemertes Research Group is to be believed.
It's pretty serious stuff. By 2010, says one of the report's authors, the average amount of time it takes to download a YouTube video will jump from 10 seconds to as much as 2 minutes. And business will suffer too. There's a truly horrific vision of telecommuters waiting hours for an accounting dump of sales figures.
So what's up? It seems that the Internet isn't growing fast enough to keep up with the spiralling Web 2.0-fuelled demand. Or more specifically, that service providers aren't planning to invest enough in bandwidth. What's implied is that the cost of internet usage will need to rise if we want to maintain current levels of service:
'...large enterprises should do all right in this environment because they can afford their own direct access circuit to the Internet if the need arises. But smaller enterprises and midmarket companies will be vulnerable.'
Scaremongering? Maybe. And perhaps we should just remember that there's a big debate going on about Net Neutrality. The telecoms companies are fighting for the right to create a two-tiered internet. You want more speed and capacity? Then all you need to do is pay us for the privilege. Here's their view. While the Net Neutrality banner is being waved by those who believe that the Internet should always be free - of charge and of interference from the service providers. Here's theirs.
But whether or not this is just all about politics, it draws attention to serious issues facing those of us providing enterprise-level services through the web. How can we protect our clients if and when the lights go out? Or even if there's a brown-out?
My client asked me the question the other day, just after we'd run this month's payroll. 'Have we got back-ups of all this ... would we be OK if the internet was down?' Well, yes we have, and yes we would. Because although we expect Accelerate HR to serve hundreds of clients eventually, right now while we're still in development there's just the one, and I've got everything backed up twice onto local machines. Designing with Rails and using a Subversion repository, that's easy. But it won't be when we have 1000 clients ... or even 10. It's not that we couldn't store the data. It would be how we would handle the work if everything broke on the day they all decided to run the payroll.
Web programmers talk lots about security. About authentication, encryption, cross-domain scripting, SQL injection. But I don't hear much about protecting clients against the ultimate risk - that you can't access the web at all. Doesn't it happen anywhere else? It certainly does here in Bahrain.
For the vast majority of sites, it probably doesn't matter too much if they're inaccessible for an hour or two. And in fact, even for my HR application, it would be inconvenient, but - because most of the inputs are not time-critical - not a deal-breaker. But there are times when the stakes are much higher. At payroll time, for example. What happens if we're not able to pay our people on time. Well, how would you feel?
And perhaps even worse than a short outage. What if everything just did get slow? Permanently? And if it's not in our hands, but down to the internet service provider?
If we're really serious about designing web applications for the enterprise, this is an issue we really must address.
I think I may see a solution. But it's going to need some thought. And some work. Drop by tomorrow, and I’ll introduce you to the notion of the Uninterruptible Application Supply.
