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As an IT professional, what advice would you give Betfair?
As an IT professional, what advice would you give Betfair?
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99.99 is 1min a week = no chance here, think they would struggle with 3 9s. And if downtime due to upgrades was included they wouldnt do 99%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability |
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I'm surprised we've had such different experiences. I remember a period of months when it was pretty bad about 18-15 months ago, then the most troublefree 12 months I'd experienced since day 1 (jun 06), followed by the worst couple of months.
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I was pleasantly surprised it was ok during the world cup, as approaching 3pm on a saturday a few months before that, the site would predictably grind to a juddering halt.
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You could well be right Viva. But people have certainly been reporting performance issues (myself included) since the last big crash. Thinking back, perhaps it had been relatively trouble free for the previous 12 months or so. I'll take a look at a couple of sites that are usually quick to report on outages, and see what the history says.
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brendanuk1
14 Mar 11 18:50 Joined: 12 Jan 02 | Topic/replies: 14,296 | Blogger: brendanuk1's blog Many organisations advertise jobs that don't exist because they know they have natural wastage and a list of potential future employees is good business sense. (I used to do it.) thats just silly, do you work in IT? No. I ran and advised businesses with many employees though. |
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Brendan
Yes, I'm probably setting the bar too high. Excluding scheduled downtime do we think 3 9s (99.9% - 10 mins a week) would: a) be realistically achievable, and b) satisfy us (I guess from a risk point of view mainly)? |
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alex,
do you have list of the tricks of the trade you could share with us?  artisan, i would say 1 outage a month lasting no longer than 1 hour (ideally less). which i guess is around 99.85% |
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99.9 sounds ok they have a good a chance of failing as of succeeding imo.
Once real time results of third party monitoring is made public they could set up a market. Will Betfair reach its uptime SLA? Yes/No |
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Viva
I've taken a squint at the BetAngel site forum - they usually pick up on BF outages pretty quickly. I found the following bits and pieces: "Mon Jan 31, 2011 11:37 am (Following scheduled maintenance) Still erratic at the moment, so please be careful before trying anything. We will be keeping an eye on things but it would be useful if anybody post issues to this thread. It looks like the site is not fully up at the moment, the odds being returned by the API are all over the place. Betfair Customer Services 03 Jul 10 13:42 Betfair would like to apologise for the difficulties some customers are experiencing on the website, particularly in respect of the ‘My Bets’ tab and markets prices not updating correctly. We are investigating the cause of this problem as a matter of extreme urgency and will keep you updated. Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:36 am Firstly some music to cheer you up while reading this post, I thought the band kind of suited: At bang on midnight Betfair, yup you guessed it, died again! Not just the API but Betfair wide. I then spent 10 mins on hold being told all the customer services people were too busy to answer my call so eventually hung up! Sat Jan 30, 2010 6:59 am Be careful this morning the API has been all over the shop overnight and is still playing up early this morning." If that's all there was, then prior to the end of January this year, they've only had two major hits in the preceding 12 months, one in July (what dates were the World Cup?), and one in January last year. So on that basis, your recollection is more accurate than mine. Although I suspect all of the niggles (slow browsers, clearing cache, Aus wallets going etc.) won't be recorded, but certainly stick in people's minds. |
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Very good Brendan. And given the general accuracy of the BF prices, people should be able to quantify their risk pretty accurately.
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and hedge their risks accordingly. we'll all be jumping up and down with delight when there is an outage!
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In fact, thinking about it some more, your idea is definitely worth pursuing. BF should create a market on the chances of the site going down today. Site users, traders in particular, could hedge against being hit by such an eventuality (effectively take out insurance). The problem being that the premiums at the moment might be prohibitive.
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getinthere
I was posting at the same time as you - obviously we're all thinking along the same lines. |
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you would of course have to keep adjusting your hedge to current exposure levels. after a month of not having an outage the price may be getting pretty short and expensive to increase your hedge :-)
if im on £14k in IT I could also fund my lifestyle by pulling the plug just after getting a wedge on. |
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It all seems very disjointed having data and people in Malta, Dublin, Australian, London etc. Did the major problems start when they started the major shift over to Dublin? Is there is a massive pre-occupation with making tax savings and this is forcing sub-optimal technical choices to made? It all seems such a waste of money moving everything just to deny the UK exchequer a few quid given how well Betfair has done over the last decade being based here.
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Seems there was a code freeze before going to Dublin, this caused a back log of changes and these were pushed through poorly tested and once problems started to happen they just ploughed on.
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Getting back to the original topic of this thread:
"As an IT professional, what advice would you give Betfair?" I'd add: There have , in the recent past (another poster mentioned the period before and during last year's World Cup, and i'd agree) , been long periods when the BF (Sports Exchange) site has been stable, reliable, and a joy to use. What irritates me, and i'd guess quite a lot of other users is that, having achieved that astonishingly (given the demands) enviable level of stability / reliability, BF seem to have blown it. Nothing that has been done during recent months has added to the BF (Sports Exchange) experience, whilst some things that have been done detract from it. The most irritating thing, to this IT prfessional, is the perversity of sacrificing such genuinly admirable achievement for no apparent gain. Just stop doing stuff! |
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Given the lack of relationship in function between say sports betting and the arcade stuff, if a lot of these new changes are for THAT perhaps they should be hosting that on completely separate servers, e.g. all such servers on arcade.betfair.com, perhaps even with a separate bank like the oz bank so it's all separate. Contain the disease so no upgrade for that has a chance of making the whole house of cards fall down.
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Problem with running markets on exchange failures is that some dodgt russian with a large botnet can probably lump on and then nuke the site. the CIA had terrorism prediction markets for a while but decided it was probably not a good idea for the same reasons.
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Gus
Yep, some of the old adages spring to mind, like: "If it ain't broke don't fix it". Just Checking I agree that there is definitely something about segregation; getting the systems into manageable bite sized discrete chunks. We all know that large unwieldy systems are a nightmare to test, diagnose and fix when they snap. Mission critical stuff is deliberately broken down into as smaller units as possible for this very reason. |
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Chilly
Good point, but, would the market not naturally price in that risk?  |
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usually senior management chip in with helpful one liners like "just facking sort it" ..so that would be my advice.
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