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Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure 159

Figure 3.16 Twitter (www.twitter.com/davechaffey)

The Twitter team has grappled with sustaining service with the growth. This is catalogued in the Twitter
status blog (http://status.twitter.com) which shows that in May 2008 uptime fell to a low of 97.14% or 21
hours across the month. While Twitter has a stated goal to make Twitter ‘a reliable global communication
utility’, system outages indicated by an animated ‘Fail Whale’ became familiar during early 2008.
Twitter was originally developed on the Ruby on Rails open-source web application development frame-
work which while sometimes used for development of content management systems didn’t scale to the
capacity required by a messaging system such as Twitter. The open-source MySQL database was initially
used for storing and retrieving updates and this also caused problems since at one stage there was a single
physical database used for storing updates. However, a new lead architect and the acquisition of Summize,

a company specializing in searching archived Tweets, had stablized uptime and response times at the time
of writing.

Source: Twitter Blog (http://blog.twitter.com) and Guardian (2008b).
Updates at: www.davechaffey.com/E-commerce-Internet-marketing-case-studies/twitter-case-study/

Managing hardware and systems software infrastructure

Management of the technology infrastructure requires decisions on Layers II, III and IV in
Figure 3.1.

Layer II – Systems software
The key management decision is standardization throughout the organization. Standardiz-
ation leads to reduced numbers of contacts for support and maintenance and can reduce
purchase prices through multi-user licences. Systems software choices occur for the client,
server and network. On the client computers, the decision will be which browser software to