Re: Using twitter as an outage notification (was : Fire, Power loss at Fisher Plaza in Seattle)

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se>]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> In a real crisis, redundancy rules.

... and simplicity.

It's always "fun" when those outages pages rely on sql backends etc, so 
they're capable of tens or hundreds of users, so they look fine normally. 
When an outage happens and people really need the information and want it, 
things stop working.

I've been advocating a distributed system with static HTML pages being 
generated and pushed out when things change. Huge load capability, you can 
put it anycasted at multiple IXes so it's geographically and ISP 
resiliant, larger ISPs can even request to get their own mirror. Keeping 
it simple.

No takers yet though, people seem to have too much confidence in 
complicated, centralized, nice looking solutions.

--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se