What the Netflix Holiday Outage Means, And What We Can Learn

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This holiday, Santa delivered us a big stocking full of internet stability issues.

Christmas was the time to sit down with family, turn on the television, and wonder why the hell Netflix wasn’t working.  You can see a timeline at GigaOm, and the culprit was clearly Amazon Web Services, whose “Elastic Load Balancing Service” failed to live up to any of the four words in its title.  Heroku and others suffered outages, but except for a sporadic report or two, Amazon’s on video service apparently ran fine.

I can’t begin to imagine the discussions between Netflix and Amazon over this one, at least I can’t begin to imagine one that doesn’t start with the words “What the hell . . .” and goes downhill from there.

(Steam had it’s own outage, but that was kind of overshadowed by this doozy).

It’s not the first time an Amazon outage has a huge impact.  As a person up to his armpits in IT, living in Silicon Valley, I get to hear about Amazon outages more than most.  Even if I don’t want to, which is frankly a lot, considering I’m the Accidental Therapist so often.

So it’s not the first time, but it’s a big outage, on a big day, with a big client, for a service that’s involved in a lot of major websites.  Time for us pro geeks to put on our Big Geek shoes and sort out what this means for us.

1) Beyond any impacts to Amazon, Netflix, etc. this is a serious wake-up call for stability over the holidays (and that includes Steam).  The fact this even could happen in this day and age is a sign that some people don’t take holiday stability seriously enough, and they bloody well should.  This was the time people would be watching movies, everyone is on the internet or is about to get on with their latest gizmo gift.  An outage should be unthinkable.

Of course we had to think of it because it happened.  So anyone working in anything remotely related to IT your takeaway is to use this incident to promote good stability and holiday policies.  And to scare the crap out of anyone not taking them seriously.

Some people have to draw the short straws and keep monitoring systems in case they have to apply the well-tested emergency plans that you doubtlessly have carefully put together.

2) Amazon has taken a black eye for this in the IT crowd, and there’s often grumbling when AWS issues happen as so many people use AWS.  Their competitors can (and probably will) step up to the plate and try to wrest service and clients away from them – and they have a pretty wide range of competitors:

If Netflix publicly moves away from Amazon, or any other big name, it’d be a big win for whoever gets the contract (and a place to send your resume).  It would also be tough on Amazon.

If you work in IT, this may well come up: “Do we use Amazon?” and you may well need to answer.

3) It’s painfully clear that as we move to a more connected world that we’re back to the old “mainframe is down” problem of terminal computing.  With more things in the cloud, we’re discovering that doesn’t mean jack unless we can get to the bloody thing.  If you work in software, please, remember this, it may save your customers stress – and you your job.

4) Netflix is not going to be held entirely blameless here because not everyone angry over the outage are geeks like us.  It’s going to be common users who aren’t happy.  Netflix has to make some tough decisions about what to do – and they cannot have any repeats of this.

5) Lost in all of this is how the Netflix competitors are handling this.  See I don’t know what, if anything, Redbox, etc. are doing.  Makes you wonder, and makes you wonder if you should look into them and see if there’s any opportunities.  I also see some potential marketing opportunities if people want to take advantage of Netflix (and further anger their competitor).

6) This is a teachable moment when we can remind people not as buried in tech as we are how complex, and at times unreliable technology is.  May be a good idea for your company, clients, or family to get a quick lesson in how things don’t work.

We can’t have outages like this anymore, not as we rely on these systems, and not at critical times.  If we’re going to live in this connected world, then it’s got to work like the disconnected world – my DVD doesn’t vanish because of an east coast server outage.  People have expectations.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

 

 

 

Recipe: Creamy Vegetable Soup

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This recipe takes a little explanation.  I cook mostly vegetarian/vegan for many reasons, but also work to diversify my protein sources because it’s too easy to rely on beans (and legumes), tofu, tempeh, and seitan.  So I try to work with higher-protein vegetable sources too.  That’s one reason I keep parboiled spinach in my freezer – heat that sucker up, add a little lemon juice and pepper, and wham, 5 grams of tasty protein.

This dish is a kitbash of several dishes, centered around a recipe that used creamed vegetables for a soup.  My goal was to get a decent-tasting cream of vegetable soup to use as a main dish with one or two other vegetables.

 

  • 2 tbsp olive oil, divided
  • 1 medium chopped onion
  • 1 cup sliced mushrooms
  • 3 cups broccoli florets
  • 2 medium potatoes, sliced
  • 4 cups water
  • 1 tsp sage leaves, dried
  • 1 tsp marjoram leaves, dried
  • 1 tsp ground thyme
  • 1 tsp basil leaves, dried
  • 1 tsp oregano leaves, dried
  • 1 tsp dill, ground
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  1. Saute onions in 1 tbsp olive oil until transparent.
  2. Add mushrooms, broccoli, potatoes, water, sage, marjoram, thyme, basil, oregano, dill, pepper, salt
  3. Bring to boil, then simmer until everything is soft – about 30 minutes.  Stir occasionally and break vegetables apart – when they do break up easy you’re done.
  4. Puree in blender or in immersion blender.
  5. Add lemon juice, paprika, remaining olive oil.
  6. Reheat until hot.  Note this doesn’t take long, and that it will make really “gloopy” bubbles if you heat to quickly and splatter like crazy.

The results?

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How Going Local Helped Me After A Move

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One of my omnipresent career subjects here is relocation because A) I moved cross country, B) I moved a lot within Silicon Valley, and C) There’s a good chance you’re going to have to do it at some point in your career and most likely for your career.  So suck it up and remember U-Haul has great deals.

It was after my second move within Silicon Valley (really), that I found myself contemplating a new commute, a new series of roads, and the potential to run into some of the horrible traffic in the area.  As I plotted out my new course, I remember how a co-worker of mine had mentioned a given expressway I hadn’t paid much attention to.  As I remember how he used to get to work, I realized this expressway wasn’t one I’d thought of (it’s Central Expressway, for those of you in the area), and it made my commute easier (and better than was was recommended by mapping software).

Soon, as I examined my new area, I began to realize just how much people who were native or had lived in the area knew of local roads.  I found out about shortcuts and expressways (where others just went to the freeway), traffic patterns, and more.  Being able to avoid jams, freeway parking lots, and more, was certainly welcome.

Of course when you think about it, when you move to an area – or consider one – you do want to talk to the locals that you know or meet.  They kind of know how things run and how things really work in wherever you’ll end up.

I strongly recommend that if relocation is in your future, take extra time to talk to people who live in the area you’re working in.  Go local, go native, go and talk to them and think like them:

  • Find out about the commute, the public transport, etc.  They’ll obviously complain (I never met anyone who liked public transport in their town), but you’ll learn a lot.  Ask what they use.
  • Find out about traffic patterns, timing, how bad weather is handled, etc.  That will help out a lot in your commute.
  • Go beyond just travel and find out about restaurant, schools, libraries, and other resources.  They have a lot to share too.
  • For that matter, “go local” and inquire about cons, comic shops, and other cool places that aren’t int the travel guides but fit you.

If you want to know an area, go local and go to the natives there.  It makes a big different.  It’s certainly meant a richer life for me – and a helluva easier set of commutes . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.