We are super excited to enter private-beta of blitz.io as an add-on in Heroku. Since the launch of blitz.io a little while ago, we are seeing tremendous adoption by app developers to quickly and easily check the performance of their cloud and mobile apps. Add utility pricing with no commitments to that mix, all of a sudden scaling out doesn’t seem all that expensive.
Archive for Scalability
Mu App Quadrant #2 – Netflix on iPhone & iPad Impacts Operator Networks More than on Android Devices
In our first edition of the Mu App Quadrant, we compared the run-time aspects of the most popular desktop video applications – Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and Amazon Video on Demand – and showed that Netflix is not particularly friendly to both Consumers and Operators.
It’s not just the apps – devices matter too!
Operators continue to struggle with the unpredictable growth of applications and the devices used to access them. With millions of people running applications like Netflix, spikes can occur on the network which often leads to disruption of other applications and services.
Recently, Korea Telecom suffered a network outage where a third-party app took the voice-call success rate down to a mere 10% because the signaling traffic generated by the app overloaded its network.
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Creating an Application Mix to Model the Production Network
Video and P2P Rule!
The traffic making up today’s networks is in a rapid state of flux. Just last week Sandvine, in their Spring 2011 Global Phenomena Report, noted that real-time entertainment continues to increase, and within North America represents almost 50% of peak fixed access traffic (much of this of course is due to Netflix). P2P traffic also continues to carve out a sizeable piece of the pie at around 20%. The rest is a mix of voice, business apps, games, Facebook and chat.
What’s interesting though is that the relative amount of traffic that isn’t application-level is tiny – all the stuff that makes networks run like DNS, ICMP, BGP and so on.
blitz.io: How many dynos do I need on Heroku?
Whatever PaaS offering you are using, this is a very common capacity-planning question: How many dynos/instances of my app do I really need in order to support x concurrent users at any given time. Auto-scaling and elastic-load-balancers are awesome, but you still need to know what you are up against. With the ruby gem from blitz.io, this is super easy to iterate and find out for yourself before you go live!
Website Performance Optimization – It’s just half the battle
There’s a new set of emerging technologies around Website Performance Optimization (or WPO). Most of these focus on the browser side of the problem and have all sorts of rules to suggest how best to inline your images, compress and minify your JavaScript and CSS, using CDN’s for static data and so on. But with the explosion of RESTful APIs on the cloud and the proliferation of mobile apps on iPhone and Android, WPO is really a misnomer. We should probably call it WebPage Performance Optimization.
