Last night, just before midnight, I sent out 497 invitation emails to come check out Devshop’s Private Beta (the rest of the invitations for people who signed up before last Friday are being sent out between now and this Friday, about 700 per day so I can watch the Beta server’s responsiveness and respond to feedback).
At around 2am, there was a power outage in South Ottawa, for about 4 hours. It reminded me of the last power outage I had at the last company I worked for. We were a developer of Web-based software. The whole company was pretty-well paralyzed for the half-day. People couldn’t check e-mail, look up anything on the Web or use some of our own Web-based applications. Even the phones were out because we had our own PBX. It may sound funny, be we ended up sending people home when Hydro told us power wouldn’t be restore until the evening.
This time, I didn’t need to panic. Even though this was a big milestone for Devshop (the beginning of Private Beta), and I had just invited 500 people to come check it out 2 hours before a half-day power outage, I wasn’t worried.
The e-mail campaign software I use (Campaign Monitor – wonderful tool by the way) is a hosted Web-app. I don’t even know what city they’re in or where the Data Center is. But it wasn’t here where the power outage was, so I knew all of my invitations would still be sent.
Devshop’s app is a hosted Web-app, and we use RackSpace (a truly fantastic company). I can’t even remember where the Data Center is, but I think it’s in Texas or Nevada. Again, not here, not without power. So I knew that my Beta testers would still be able to come check out Devshop. The only thing the power outage did for me was become a pesky annoyance for a while because I couldn’t check my e-mail or watch my Web-stats package track the incoming visits with glee.
I knew that when morning rolled around, if the power was still out, all I had to do was grab the laptop, and drive for 10 minutes in any direction to the nearest Starbuck’s, plunk myself down with a wireless ‘Net connection and a coffee, and get back to work. In fact, a whole office or at least a whole dev team could do just that these days (laptops assumed).
A lot of people are still nervous about the whole hosted software movement. “What if the Data Center goes down? We can’t work?!” Honestly, with the way Data Centers are architected these days, there are few corporate head-quarters in the world that could survive a natural disaster better than a Data Center. The truth is, the applications and data are far safer there than at most corporate head-quarters.
So for Devshop, it’s kind of like the company’s infrastructure is distributed – and protected from any single point of failure (like too many people cranking up their air conditioners on a 49 degree C day like today and knocking a power grid offline, or the occasional thunder storm like the doozy we had last night).
Gotta love it.
