Audioscrobbler, del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, Paypal, Weblogs.com? Well, many things, probably. But for my purposes, the linking factor is that they’ve all had significant outages and downtime in recent weeks or months.
Now this is not intended at all as a criticism – in most cases these are no cost services, and as such offer no guarantees about availability. And personally, as I’ve covered many times, I’m a big fan of del.icio.us and Flickr in particular (and mentioned both frequently at the recent analyst event).
But what this does indicate, I think, is that in a services world, scalability is at a premium. It’s ironic from where I sit, because I sat through far too many WebLogic/WebSphere bakeoffs (with their respective tens of thousand per CPU licensing deals) in the late 90’s that were intended for deployments of a few thousand seats, while the services above are seeing traffic at least in the millions and are often delivered through quote unquote non-commercial server software.
In other words, scalability is becoming the priority it was once perceived to be. Go figure, maybe WebLogic and WebSphere do have a future (some would disagree, however – more on that Monday).
Update: Check out Audioscrobbler’s response to the scale question – interesting.
