It's a problem that services like Netflix and Last.fm never consider could happen and when it does they are scrambling everywhere and don't know how to deal with the flames properly, stuff just looks broken. What I have been doing the past year is creating basic html pages for every service I release as an emergency landing page that I easily put up at the press of a button.
Actually the other comment from b0b0b0b is pretty accurate - Netflix tries to gracefully degrade functionality when 'stuff goes down', so that people can still get the basic streaming service. Netflix also uses Chaos Monkey (http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/chaos-monkey-how-n...)
Comments
It's a problem that services like Netflix and Last.fm never consider could happen and when it does they are scrambling everywhere and don't know how to deal with the flames properly, stuff just looks broken. What I have been doing the past year is creating basic html pages for every service I release as an emergency landing page that I easily put up at the press of a button.
Actually the other comment from b0b0b0b is pretty accurate - Netflix tries to gracefully degrade functionality when 'stuff goes down', so that people can still get the basic streaming service. Netflix also uses Chaos Monkey (http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/12/chaos-monkey-how-n...)
P.S. I work there.