Most of you probably don't know me, my name is Steve Cole and I am the Lead for Quixtar's Web Operations. I have been working with the Quixtar.com applications since September 1999 and was one of the people responsible for creating what is now known as Quixtar's Web Operations.
The responsibilities in Web Operations (herein referred to as WebOps) are broad. We are required to have indepth knowledge of every application. Additionally, the team is largely responsible for the production architecture which is built for performance, scalability, high availability and security, just to touch the surface. WebOps is considered the front line support and can be contacted on a moments notice. We are on-call and available 24x7. When on-call, we actually take our laptops, equip with broadband air cards, everywhere we go!
OK - enough about WebOps...now that you know a little about what we do, on with true purpose of this post...End of Month (herein referred to as EOM), which for us in Quixtar IT is defined as the final 4-6 hours of the last day of the month.
EOM at Quixtar is not only an important time for IBO's, it is also a critical time for Quixtar IT. During every EOM, 1-2 representative from each team directly supporting the web in Quixtar IT, a total of 10-15 people, work at the office until after midnight. We all get together in the largest conference room at Quixtar to share information about the web site. With laptops and projectors in hand, everyone displays and shares relevant data for their area on the walls of the conference room. It's really quite a sight to see, with the lights out and 10-12 projectors displaying live Quixtar.com web site statistics all around the room for every major application across 2 live data centers receiving web traffic for Quixtar.com!
Why such a big deal? Besides being a very important time of the month for our IBOs, Quixtar.com receives 4 or more times the Internet traffic as compared to any peak hour, any other day of the month. That is a lot of web traffic! With that large of a spike in traffic, applications and resources that ran fine all month long can change behavior or expose potential bottlenecks that only occur under such high volumes of traffic.
In the past, we have had our share of pains dealing with the EOM traffic...you may know what I am talking about...if you do, those times were definitely not our finest hours, but we have learned from them and aggressively adapted. Today, our EOM activities are mostly proactive. Each EOM we take note of each application's behavior and capacity, identifying areas to improve or scale out before the next EOM. That information starts the cycle of month long preparations leading up to the next EOM.
Well, that's a little bit of what EOM means to WebOps at Quixtar. Although that only scratches the surface, any more information in a single post would be a bit much. But I suspect there will be many opportunities to update you all on details of future EOM activities!
Take care, send comments and know I will be monitoring your web traffic Thursday evening during May 2007 EOM!
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