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June 21, 1999

TechView:
An Innovator Falls Off The Leading Edge

he recent trials and tribulations of online auction house eBay have certainly had one side effect. They've drawn attention to the limits of how far Web technology can be pushed.

The online auction software used by eBay certainly qualifies as a business-critical Web application--eBay's whole business depends on the Web site. But despite what would be considered in most quarters as fairly extensive failure-proofing, eBay was essentially out of business for a whole day earlier this month. The impact has been a loss of confidence in the company among customers--and shareholders. And in the online-commerce business, confidence is about the only equity you've got.

Reportedly, eBay has blamed the failure on Sun Microsystems' software. But let's face it--the one thing you can't effectively outsource is blame. Because of eBay's rapid growth, the company was essentially writing checks that its coders couldn't pay.

When people talk about business-critical systems, the conversation usually centers on hardware-centric themes such as high availability, clustering, and scalability. But no matter how fault-tolerant your hardware is, bad software can turn it into a very scalable paperweight pretty quickly.

Usually, the way to prevent software failures of this magnitude is to load test the living heck out of it and to build on top of software that's already been battle-tested. Of course, the penalty that eBay and other innovative companies face is that their whole business advantage is in rapid innovation and homegrown code magic. The more rapid the pace of innovation, the less time there is to properly test--and the further out on a limb each iteration of the system goes.

On top of that, properly testing the scalability and durability of Web applications is not what one would call an exact science. Sure, there are tools such as those from Mercury Interactive, Rational Software, and RSW Software, that make it possible to do all sorts of test loads on systems--but these only really test for expected conditions. The tools are getting closer, however--for instance, Mercury Interactive's TestSuite Enterprise 6.0 includes a tool that measures the impact of heavy IP traffic on user interaction with the site, and the suite can import information from logfiles to generate test loads.

The other problem with testing--especially for companies already running on paper-thin margins with their Web operations--is the cost of doing it properly. Testing takes time, people, and hardware, whether you outsource it or not. Of course, there's a simple way to justify the cost--just look at what happened to eBay.