real user monitoring

Aaron Peters (Turbobytes): Why all CDNs are not created equal [PODCAST]

22 Feb 2013

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This week’s podcast is, for me, a fascinating convergence of two hot-button topics: content delivery and real user measurement (RUM).

This is a really exciting time in the CDN space. If you haven’t spent a lot of time in the content delivery world, you need to know that it’s an intensely competitive space. In just a few short years, it’s shifted from being a virtual monopoly to a much more competitive landscape, with new contenders arriving almost weekly, it seems. Content delivery can be expensive. It can also be really hard to know which CDN will actually deliver the goods the fastest, since this can fluctuate over time and geographical locations.

Over in its own parallel world, RUM has really evolved over the past few years — from an arcane topic discussed by only the geekiest geeks to a subject that’s on pretty much every site owner’s lips (or at least should be). It’s a no-brainer that any content owner wants to get as much insight as possible into how their content moves out in the real world. The funny thing is that it took so long for our tools to catch up to this need.

It was only a matter of time before someone saw an opportunity to apply RUM to pick the best CDN by region/time. Pioneered by my good friends at Cedexis, this practice has been adapted for the SME market by my guest this week, Aaron Peters, along with his partner Sajal Kayan. Their company, Turbobytes, which launched last spring, monitors the real-world performance of six global CDNs, and then ensures that site owners’ content is always delivered by the fastest one. They buy buckets of CDN capacity and resell it to their customers, thus creating a one-stop shop for CDN measurement, dynamic CDN selection, and small object caching. And as the icing on the cake, Turbobytes wants to monetizes all the RUM data it gathers by selling it back to the CDNs.

Aaron was kind enough to sit down and share with me how he and Sajal came to this business model.

Listen to the podcast: Aaron Peters

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NEW PODCASTS: Mark Jennings (Lonely Planet) and Josh Fraser (Torbit)

14 Feb 2013

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Now that the buzz around last week’s announcement is starting to subside, time to play a bit of catch-up on the podcast front.

I’m very, very happy with how well-received the podcast has been so far — no doubt thanks to having a non-stop stream of rockstar guests, including folks like Pat Meenan, Eric Goldsmith, and Ilya Grigorik. The stream is still in full flow, and I’m really excited about the guests who are lined up in the coming weeks. If you have any suggestions or feedback, I’m all ears. Leave a comment, or email me at joshua(at) webperformancetoday(dot)com.

Now on to my latest guests…

I love getting a chance to talk with the people who work behind the scenes to keep well-used sites fast, so I was thrilled to chat with Mark Jennings, Technical Operations Manager at Lonely Planet Online. If you’ve ever used the Lonely Planet site, you know that it’s an incredibly useful resource. And if you’ve done a lot of travelling and tried to access the web in remote locations, you know that performance can be a huge pain. Mark’s job is making sure that it isn’t an issue for Lonely Planet’s audience, and he and his team do a pretty remarkable job. Getting there wasn’t always easy, though, and in our interview, he talks about the challenges of selling performance internally. He also talks about the massive growth in Lonely Planet’s mobile traffic, and what this means in terms of not just making pages faster, but keeping them fast for every visitor.

Listen to the podcast: Mark Jennings

My most recent guest is Josh Fraser, CEO of Torbit, a company that’s doing some cool things in the real user measurement space. (A few people thought I was crazy for interviewing Josh, since Torbit‘s solution overlaps the FEO space, making them something of a competitor — but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a big pond and there’s lots of room for everyone.) Josh and I are both serial start-up guys, so we had a really interesting chat about entrepreneurialism. We also talked about the evolution of performance metrics, from technical to business, and Josh made some predictions about what 2013 will hold for our industry.

Listen to the podcast: Josh Fraser

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Ilya Grigorik (Google): When it comes to tackling web performance, we all still have a lot to learn [PODCAST]

24 Jan 2013

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It doesn’t matter what area of web performance you specialize in, if you’re anywhere in the performance space, this week’s podcast has something for you:

  • social analytics
  • RUM
  • SPDY
  • HTTP 2.0
  • CDNs
  • mobile performance
  • scuttlebutt about sharing an office with Steve Souders

The guy who’s delivering the goods on all these facets of performance is Ilya Grigorik, one of the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, inside or outside our industry. Ilya has a fascinating breadth of experience. He’s deep in the weeds on a few sides of the performance equation: from protocols to analytics to how pages are actually put together. As developer advocate at Google, he’s not only chin deep in Google Analytics and SPDY, but also walking the DOM and fiddling with CSS. And he gets to share an office with Steve, which you’ll hear me grill him mercilessly about. :)

What makes talking with Ilya really refreshing is that he doesn’t just have a lot to share about what he knows — he’s also really candid about what we don’t know and what we could be doing better. And he’s remarkably upbeat about the Sisyphean task of making the entire web faster. Enjoy.

Listen to the podcast: Ilya Grigorik

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Eric Goldsmith (AOL): Why everyone has to think like a data scientist [PODCAST]

17 Jan 2013

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It was a great honour and a privilege to chat with AOL performance evangelist and operations architect Eric Goldsmith for this week’s podcast. If you’re newer to the performance scene, Eric’s name may not be familiar to you. That’s because in 2010 he got pulled off the web performance circuit sideways into the world of big data, and went from headlining at Velocity to headlining at Strata.

But web performance and big data are intersecting worlds, and make no mistake about it, Eric is still very much a big thinker — and doer — in the performance world. With real user measurement (RUM) poised to become a topic on every site owner’s lips, Eric shares some important insights about how to extract actionable metrics from your RUM data, and how to avoid falling into the trap of confusing correlation with causation.

While Eric is in the enviable position of having massive amounts of data to mine (in his own words: “I revel in the scale”), he points out that, for those mining smaller data sets, the fundamentals remain the same. He also mentions that preaching the importance of statistics is an uphill battle at any size of company, even AOL.

We covered a lot of ground in this podcast, from how to teach stats within a corporate culture to changes in the RUM world over the past seven years. Enjoy.

Listen to the podcast: Eric Goldsmith

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Geoffrey Smalling (CTO, Wine.com): Why performance measurement is an art form, how mobile is a game changer, and where the cloud fits in [PODCAST]

10 Jan 2013

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It’s hard to believe it’s only been a month since launching the Web Performance Today podcast. I’ve spoken with some really smart folks so far, and I’m tremendously excited about the upcoming interviews we’ve lined up.

Till now, we’ve heard from some great minds in the performance solution space — guys like Cliff Crocker and Theo Schlossnagle. This week, we’re going to hear from someone who buys those solutions: Geoffrey Smalling, CTO of Wine.com. (Full disclosure: Wine.com is a Strangeloop customer.)

Despite being the number one online wine seller in the world, Geoffrey still considers Wine.com a small ecommerce site, but the insights he shares are relevant to owners and developers of ecommerce sites of all sizes.

While Wine.com may not be an Amazon, it does an inspiring job of taking a big-company approach to performance. The company had its “aha” moment back in 2009, when A/B testing revealed that fast stripped-down versions of pages vastly outperformed the gorgeous bells-and-whistles versions. Since then, they’ve been on a mission to make every single release of their site faster than before, with a goal of delivering every page in 3 seconds or less.

Geoffrey and his team aren’t afraid to adopt new technologies. (On top of Strangeloop, they’ve also been using New Relic for more than a year, and Geoffrey is a big fan of their product; you’ll learn why in the podcast.) He also has a lot of experience with turning down technology vendors, and in this interview he shares his major pet peeves about salespeople.

I enjoyed chatting with Geoffrey immensely, but I especially enjoyed talking about one of my pet topics — mobile. Wine.com has experimented with everything from m.dot sites to iPhone and iPad apps, and the company does a phenomenal job of tracking its successes and failures. Geoffrey was remarkably candid in sharing some of these successes and failures with me. He also shared some astute observations on current mobile usage and where he sees this platform going.

I hope you enjoy this podcast as much as I did. Thanks for listening. :)

Listen to the podcast: Geoffrey Smalling

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