Section 5.1 Managing Enterprise Architectures{0}
The article I chose was “Facebook outage was biggest ever” by Doug Gross. Last thursday Facebook’s website faced a software problem and was shut down for about 2 1/2 hours. Facebook has a program that automatically fixes software problems when they arise. The program ended up making the software problems worse instead of better, making Facebook shut down the entire site to fix it. It was the databases that were malfunctioning. Once they found the root problem and fixed it, they slowly started letting users log back on.
This article relates to 5.1 because Facebook’s infrastructure architecture failed. With Facebook having over 500 million users now, the whole architecture of the site is complicated to manage and maintain. They probably have a lot of different software and programs, being updated constantly to ensure Facebook doesn’t crash. But nobody is perfect and Facebook did crash leaving some unsatisfied users. They probably didn’t have to many people delete their account because of it, but bad media may discourage some new user’s from signing up though.
Every company needs to have a good backup and recovery plan in case something like this does happen, which may be inevitable. Facebook was relatively quick to act having their site back up and running in 2 1/2 hours. They had a plan in place in case anything like this were to happen and was able to fix the problem in a timely fashion. Facebook has been a reliable company for a long time, this incident being the biggest foul up in 4 1/2 years. They have been very successful in building and maintaining their sites infrastructure up to this point. They have all five characteristics of a solid infrastructure architecture: flexability, scalability, reliability, availability, and performance. This incident was an example of their reliability slipping a little bit, but all things considered, they have been very successful in building what Facebook is today.
Gross, Doug. September 24, 2010 “Facebook outage was biggest ever” Retrieved September 27, 2010 from:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/24/facebook.outage/index.html
Baltzan & Phillips, Business Driven Information Systems, 2nd Edition, McGraw-Hill, Inc. 2009