Northern Rock - Lessons for Web Service customers

Richard Beddard over at the iii Blog has covered the ins and outs of the dbacle (runs on a bank in Britain for the first time in a generation).

But there is an underlying story also going on - thousands of people have been unable to get onto the website to move their money, ostensibly because of the huge amount of traffic that hit it.

Two lessons here:

(i) For Web Services to be taken seriously for important applications they need to be able to - provably - scale quickly and reliably. This needs assets like an Amazon cloud arrangement.

(ii) Not suggesting this is the case here, but it is clear that in difficult times, WebService owners could be tempted - and able - to deny their users/customers access. Web Service players need to be able to reassure customers this will not occur.

Postscript - Tom Ilube of Garlik writes about what it would feel like to be in such a situation over here