Leon Fayer, a vice president at Omniti with over 20 years in development and operations, discusses the impacts of social media on large systems. He shares a case study of a media website that faced significant challenges and outages when relying on Facebook Connect for authentication. Fayer emphasizes the importance of creating fallback plans and not using social networks in critical paths to mitigate risks.

1. Breaking Social Dependency
Leon Fayer
@papa_fire

2. Who am I ?
• 20+ years of development and operations of large systems
• currently Vice President at OmniTI
• can be found online:
• @papa_fire
• http://fayerplay.com
• github:lfayer

3. Why talk about it?
“FAILURE IS SUCCESS
IF WE LEARN FROM IT”
Malcolm S. Forbes

4. Social media landscape

5. Definitions
SOCIAL NETWORK = THIRD PARTY SERVICE

6. Benefits
channels to quickly reach millions of people
ability to leverage someone else’s work
cost/time to market

7. Drawbacks
SOCIAL NETWORK = THIRD PARTY SERVICE
||
NO CONTROL

8. And now for real example
:case study:

9. Setting the stage
• large entertainment media website
• continuous content updates
(images/articles/videos)
• event driven visits; up to 10x normal traffic
• ecommerce component

10. The decision
“let’s use Facebook Connect as auth”

11. Problem?
Implementing Facebook Connect
200ms -> 800ms

12. Suddenly

13. Problem
Facebook Down
“infinite” spike -> 0ms

14. Tips
3. Create a fallback plan
1. Only connect to social networks when needed
2. Don’t use social networks in the critical path

15. Questions?

16. Leon Fayer
Twitter: @papa_fire
Blog: http://fayerplay.com
Github: lfayer