Blogarithms
Doug Kaye's thoughts on web services, web hosting and managed services.
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Wimpy SLAs. In the August 13, 2001 issue of Interactive Week, Max Smetannikov write about the increasing importance of service level agreements (SLAs) in web-hosting relationships. There's a typical story:
"...the SLA that Right Brain agreed to covers only its Web site uptime. E-mail, it turns out, is outsourced to Critical Path, and there are "glitches" in that relationship; Critical Path's SLA covers Bigstep, but not Bigstep's customers."
Every time I read something like this I say, "Yeah, heard that before." I wish I could send him a copy of my book, but it's not out yet.
Posted Tuesday, August 14, 2001 11:18:05 AM 
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CDNs: A Dead-end Road? One of the industry veterans I interviewed during my research for Strategies for Web Hosting and Managed Services wrote to suggest that I may want to re-think writing the next book, Internet Content Delivery.
His premise is this: "CDNs were invented when 60% of the time it takes to download a file came from WAN latency. Today, 15% of the time comes from WAN latency and the rest is from local loop. That means that if Akamai completely eliminated the WAN latency, it wouldn't be noticeable to the surfer! I also know most of the CDN companies are out of business or about to go out of business, hanging from a service provider model into a software model."
Here's my reply. "Your point about the shift of the bottleneck to the last mile is a good one. However, using the same logic, once the last-mile problem *is* resolved, the bottleneck shifts back, at least toward the cloud. I even addressed that in the first book's chapter on connectivity performance, showing how packet loss (in particular) is much more significant as the speed on the lowest link along the path increases. Although the deployments of DSL and cable are still going slowly, a few years from now content providers will be faced with deployment in a world where the local loop is not the bottleneck. Of course, the book won't even be on the shelves until mid-2002, so it may coincide reasonably well.
"That the current crop of CDNs are going out of business doesn't bother me. Like others, they're finding that they grew too quickly, driven by the abundance of seemingly endless capitalization and debt financing. We know that now, given perfect hindsight. Luckily, the technology and knowledge will survive for the next generation of players."
Ah, if only the wisdom that might protect us from greedy financing would survive as well. Unfortunately, greed has a short memory.
Posted Tuesday, August 14, 2001 6:34:27 AM
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Those crazy Sweedes. I don't understand it either, but I think this site is pretty funny. [The Register]
Posted Tuesday, August 14, 2001 5:46:52 AM
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CDNs With Uploads? Joyce Rouston has a story on Stardust about Accellion. With $18 million in funding from Hong Kong venture investors, the company has built something that's a cross between a 30-location CDN and a global storage system (GSS) like Scale Eight.
I'm not convinced about the value provided by Accellion, but it's CEO is Warren Kaplan who was at the helms of both AboveNet and Netcom at the time they went public.
Posted Tuesday, August 14, 2001 12:58:21 AM
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Mark Pilgrim: I agree. Ray Ozzie's got questions, I've got answers. Now, keep in mind that Ray Ozzie is a really smart guy. He made Notes and later sold it for millions. Now he has Groove, which is supposed to be the Next Big Thing (tm). I had the opportunity to meet Ray Ozzie last fall at a developer's conference; I spoke with him briefly, and I can attest to the fact that he really believes that Groove is going to change the world. Well, it's not. Groove is an overkill solution in search of a problem. [diveintomark]
Posted Tuesday, August 14, 2001 12:27:45 AM
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