Performance Zen

Author: spierzchala

  • Web Performance Concepts: The Series

    Over the space of two years I have created a series of posts that explore the analytical and statistical concepts that compose the foundation of a solid Web performance strategy.

    These mark my attempt to move from a purely technical analysis of providing a solution to the problem at hand. These posts move my approach to one that examines the issues from a higher perspective, one where I can place the singular issues that face people in the areas of Technical Operations and Business Operations into a cross-industry, global Web performance context.
    These posts highlight some of the core concepts which need to be re-examined, especially within the reality that faced by all online businesses right now: tightening budgets, static or contracting staffing, and the need to not lose the performance edge.

    I hope that these nine posts help you reconsider how you examine Web performance data when you are trying to maintain and grow your business in these troubled times.

    1. Web Performance, Part I: Fundamentals
    2. Web Performance, Part II: What are you calling ‘average’?
    3. Web Performance, Part III: Moving Beyond Average
    4. Web Performance, Part IV: Finding The Frequency
    5. Web Performance, Part V: Baseline Your Data
    6. Web Performance, Part VI: Benchmarking Your Site
    7. Web Performance, Part VII: Reliability and Consistency
    8. Web Performance, Part VIII: How do you define fast?
    9. Web Performance, Part IX: Curse of the Single Metric

  • Green Card: I Have One

    Today, our Green Cards arrived in the mail.
    The process started on March 23 2005 when our applications were accepted. So, slightly less than four years later, the process is complete. At least for 10 years.
    I want to thank the lawyers who handled this for us, and my employer for sponsoring me and going through this, well, special process.

  • A Brand is not a Conversation

    Brand and Branding are tossed about as sterile concepts that people want to dissect on a repeated basis, as if a deeper understanding of the words themselves will allow a view into the soul of a people.
    When I step back and examine these concepts, free of involvement in the world of Brand creation and propagandization, Branding and Brands degenerate to the most basic definition of the terms: the painful act of marking an object as something you own.
    Viewed in this way, Branding is painful, permanent, and performed against the will of the object/being being inflicted with the Brand. It is a one-way act. A Brand is forced on a being/object, without any opportunity for a reciprocal act.
    Corporate Branding is the same. Branding is not a conversation. As I have said previously (here), a Brand and the act of Branding is read-only, closed-source. The Brand is shaped and formed to uniquely identify its owner, and then it is placed with pride wherever the Brand-owner sees fit.
    While a Brand is owned, and Branding marks those objects as belonging to the Brand owner, it is not a conversation. Reputation is a conversation. And conversations that occur about Brands seal their Reputations.
    Wear your Brand. But then talk about it with others. You may find that the Brand is not what defines the company to the people who see it.

  • Web Performance in Hard Times

    In the end, it’s all about performance. And when times get hard and budgets get tight, performance should be high on the list of online businesses.
    The issue that I see when I work with online firms is that the first item to be on the chopping block is the performance budget. Performance appears to be equated with expense.
    What name I have in the arena of Web performance that I do have I made during the last economic slowdown in 2000-2002 by writing and evangelizing some very simple facts:

    1. HTTP compression is easy to set up and can reduce the bandwidth that your text files require to download. This is even more important as more and more companies build complete applications in Javascript.
    2. Allow others to cache what is cacheable. Offload your site to edge and corporate servers, and let them do the heavy lifting.
    3. Enable HTTP persistence. Fewer TCP connection requests make downloads run more effectively and take advantage of the benefits of the efficiencies of built into TCP.

    Steve Souders’ book reminds people that designers can help this process by designing a proper page. Andy King’s book (my review) reminds people that Business and Technical Operations need to work together to reach the same goal.
    So, rather than seeing this time of contraction as a challenge, take it as a chance to solidify your performance position. Retrench, re-examine, and reveal your performance issues. Integrate Web performance into the day-to-day operations of the entire business, and work within your current configuration.
    The companies that learn to work more effectively and efficiently with a reduced budget and fewer people will come out on the other side as those poised to take advantage of the opportunities that are still out there.

  • My desk after two years

    Two years ago, I bought my first digital camera, and snapped this picture.

    Kodak z612 -- The First Picture

    Today, I repeated the picture. Much more chaos.

    My Desk

  • Methodology Before Measurement

    Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

    Galileo Galilei

    The greatest challenge facing companies today is not finding ways to measure performance. The key issue is one of understanding what should be measured and validating that there is agreement on what the purpose of the measurement is.

    Organizations are complex. And with complexity arises the need to gather data for different purposes. In my series discussing Why Web Measurements?, I broke organizations down into four groups, each one having distinctly different needs for measurements and data.

    While this series focuses on Web performance, the four categories (Customer Generation, Customer Retention, Business Operations, and Technical Operations) can be broadly applied to all aspects of your business.
    In each of the four categories, whether it is for Web performance or financial analysis, determining what and why to measure is a critical predecessor to the establishment of measurements and the examination of data.

    2009 will be a year of reflection and retrenchment. Companies will be examining all aspects of their business, all of their relationships with vendors, all of the ways they measure themselves. The question that must be asked before succumbing to the rushing panic of cost-cutting and layoffs is: Do you fundamentally understand why and what you measure and what it is really telling you?

  • Branding, Authority, and Reputation: A Parable

    On a fine July day, a local man runs into a neighborhood bar carrying a stack of pamphlets, and wearing the hat announcing a new service. His beaming smile and easy attitude made the rest of the patrons want to listen to him.

    “I have seen the greatest new thing in the history of our species,” he started. “A man in this very town has created a simple potion that, when taken once a month, allows your teeth to gleam, your farts to smell like rainbows, and gold coins to appear instantly from your fingertips!”

    The crowd surged around him, listening to his spiel. They were spellbound, and chattered amongst themselves enthusiastically.

    Then a local Man of Prestige entered the bar and listened for a few minutes. He shouted down the smiling pitchman and, with a sarcastic sneer on his face, said, “That’s Crazy Joe’s stuff isn’t it?”

    The crowd stopped shouting and started murmuring.

    “Crazy Joe has been tinkering in his garage for years,” the Man of Prestige started to say, not repressing his mirth. “One of his potions turned his dog into a three-legged, one-eyed rabbit with a rat-tail. His family has left him, and he is living on hand-outs.”

    The Man of Prestige made his final point: “Why would you by something from a failure like Crazy Joe?”

    The murmur had turned into a beehive buzz. Then someone shouted, “Look! It’s Crazy Joe!”

    As Joe walked into the bar, expecting the welcome of a returning hero, he was met by jeers and shouts of derision. The crowd occasionally looked to the Man of Prestige to ensure he was still laughing.

    “Drinks on me!”, Shouted the Man of Prestige, and the crowd followed him to the other end of the bar for their free gift for believing in his opinion.

    Joe was near tears. His pitchman was in shock. After a moment, Joe spoke up. Looking at his pitchman, he said, “C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

    They sat at the empty end of the bar as the Man of Prestige regaled the crowd with tales of himself and his ventures and investments. They watched in disgust for a few minutes, then Joe ordered two shots of scotch for each of them.

    A few seats down, two strangers from another town sat. They had no idea who the Man of Prestige was, or why he was so quick to dismiss this great idea. They sat, quietly watching Joe and his pitchman shoot down their drinks, take one more forlorn look to the end of the bar, and get up to leave.

    Then, they watched in incredulous disbelief as Joe create three solid gold coins from his index finger to pay for the drinks.

    The strangers gaped as Joe and the pitchman walked out, then looked back to the gabbling madness surrounding the Man of Prestige, all of whom were oblivious to the great thing that had just happened.

    The strangers jumped from their stools and ran off after Joe and the pitchman, pulling money from their pockets as they ran.

  • SLA: The myth of simplicity

    Service Level Agreements. SLAs.

    Three of the most contentious words, and most contentious acronym, in the technology sector. Arguments are had, suits are filed, and relationships broken and strained as a result of this single concept.

    How can something seemingly simple as setting an agreed upon level of service delivery be so problematic and misunderstood?

    The word agreement is the key to the problem. SLAs assume that all parties understand and agree of the level of service. And how that information is to be reported. And who is responsible for reporting the data. And how long you have to file grievances. And who handles problems. And…well, lawyers are involved.

    As Guy Kawasaki states regarding the lies of venture capitalists: there is no such thing as a vanilla term sheet.

    There is also no such thing as a vanilla SLA. A company that tries to present you with a standardized SLA is trying to pull something over on you.

    Some rules about SLAs.

    1. The vendor does not define the SLA. If the vendor selling the product tells you, the customer, what your expected level of service is, then they don’t care about you. Find another vendor.
    2. The customer does not define the SLA. If the customer tells you that they cannot sign an SLA unless you, the vendor, agree to their conditions, walk away from the deal.
    3. An SLA is not an SLO. Service Level Objectives are the targets of success defined by both parties within the SLA. These numbers, however, are not the alpha and the omega of an SLA.
    4. A customer-initiated penalty condition is always in the vendors favor. If the vendor states that the client must initiate the SLA grievance conversation when SLOs are violated, then the vendor is assuming that you are not looking at the data.
    5. SLOs should never be based on single, aggregated metrics from the data. If some bozo tries to say that they provide 99% availability and 3 second average performance, walk away. That is not an SLO.
    6. SLAs are not set in stone. If something is not working, or if targets change, or anything changes, then the parties have to be willing to sit down on a schedule (defined in the SLA) and renegotiate their SLA.
    7. The vendor and the customer have transparent access to the data used for the SLO. If the ccustomer cannot see the data that the vendor is using in the SLO anytime it wants, there will always be a level of mistrust. If you like having all your customers mistrust you, this is a great strategy.
    8. The Problem and Issue Management processes are clearly defined. When something bad happens, or a change needs to be made, the customer and the vendor have to have very clearly defined roles in the process. Responsibility and trust. Do you have that in your current SLA?
    9. The customer and the vendor decide when a problem or issue is resolved. It is not up to one side in an SLA to decide when an issue or problem is resolved. As there are likely penalties involved the longer the abnormal state exists, the customer has a vested interest in quick resolution. As there is likely lost revenue on the table, the customer has the same interest. But the customer also has the seemingly unreasonable idea that this will never happen again, it will be clearly documented, and that getting the right solution is better than getting a solution.
    10. Communication is the key to a good SLA. In the 9 previous points, the emphasis is on communication, the sharing of information. Current SLAs seem to be designed to hide information from each side, and only release it under the most dire situation. People talk. The information will get out. You want your well-crafted brand to implode because you have a reputation as sneaky and untrustworthy?

    I’ve likely missed many of the key points, but these are the ones that I see, from both sides of the field, on a pretty regular basis.

    In the end, an SLA is not simple. It is not standardized. It is not defined by one side or the other. It is a negotiated treaty of behavior that, in the end, defines the daily operational relationship between two organizations. If you enter an SLA process with both sides trying to find the best way to work together in the long term, there is a good chance that the SLA will be easier than if you go in as stone-cold adversaries.

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  • Why Web measurements? The Series.

    In my life as a consultant, I often discuss What Web performance data means and how to interpret it to solve problems. Solving the problems is, however, inherently based on whether the data that is collected is meaningful. In trying to find data that is meaningful, we have found that there are four categories that Web performance measurements fall into: Customer Generation, Customer Retention, Business Operations, and Technical Operations.

    Customer Generation

    How can you use Web performance measurement data to outperform your competition and impress your prospects. Read it here!

    Customer Retention

    Impress your customers with your skill and responsiveness, and keep the competition from sneaking in the back door. Read it here!

    Business Operations

    Know how you are doing against your competition and prioritize what you need to do to stay ahead. Read it here!

    Technical Operations

    Know what to measure and how often to keep a detailed eye on your internal systems and external performance. Read it here!