Weather.com - open source software cloudy to sunny
The famous Weather.com meteorological website is implementing the "transfer to open source software", and the results show that this move effectively reduces the company's cost and improves the capacity of the system.
More than 4 years ago, Weather.com fully relies on private commercial software to operate thousands of web pages and climate forecasts.
Now, this website in Atlanta not only has 50,000,000 pages, but also almost all the websites above open source software. In the process of implementing the "transfer to the open source software" strategy, the company has reduced one-third of expenditure and increases the processing capacity of the site by 30%.
"As long as it is reasonable, we are always happy to see an alternative to open source software," DAN AGRONOW information execution president said. " The reason is very simple, he said: "No matter how private software makers bring FEAR (fear) UncertelyTy and DouBt (Doubt) (Doubt) to open source software, many open source products are very excellent, and configured and running They only spend half of the price of commercial software "
Agronow recalls that there is an IBM sales agent warns him that if you give up IBM's WebSphere Application Server, he is very likely that he is very likely to work.
"We have heard too much fud, but when we truly try to do it, we have not seen those problems that commercial software vendors often mentioned," said Agronow. (Agronow once as a technical project manager for technical project manager for 14 years before joining weather.com.)
"My experience tells me that the technical support of our open source software is actually better than the service software of the commercial software," he added.
Turn to Linux
But this is not equal to no technical challenge. One of them is in 2001, it was at the time of WebSphere, but because the problem of money intended to change the operating system - Solaris running from Sun in Sun 420R Server Solaris transferred to Linux running in IBM XServer 330 Server.
"We have encountered some problems, such as installing scripts do not run, or the GUI connection is not possible. There are various different detail issues existing in different operating systems, and Linux is not fully resolved. "Jon Badnell recalls (Jon is the main system architect of weather.com).
By cooperating with IBM, 23 members of Weather.com, including system administrators, developers, and architects finally solved all issues. During this process, they found that they not only enhanced confidence, but also experts in technology have become an expert in open source software. Finally, weather.com only saves the company's huge amount of funds for the company because of the transfer to the Linux operating system. Badnell said: "We replace $ 500,000 machine with $ 50,000."
Tomcat WEBSPhere
Because Linux runs a precedent in the Intel chip computer, weather.com begins to seek an open source solution to replace WebSphere. Again, reducing spending is the biggest motivation. Another reason is to reduce complexity and unnecessary things due to running WebSphere.
WebSphere server software does not bring convenience and protection to weather.com. In the Snowstorm season in January 2002, Weather.com's website traffic exceeded 18 million times, then Weather.com needs to restart WebSphere to solve the problem of traffic load.
"Our website is large, there is a lot of click rate, but we don't have a complex operation, there is no need for transaction processing. Users generally read information, not write information. So we didn't use the remaining four quarters of WebSphere The function, "Badnell said. "WebSphere brings us only unnecessary complexity."
IBM response is another problem. IBM said: "We don't think you can succeed, and you will finally stay in WebSphere and pay for technical support," reyNolds said. (IBM refused to this comment.) But the development team of Weather.com did not be intimidated, and the developer of Weather.com was already using Tomcat. Reynolds said: "We have long found that the open source community is our answer. We are not a blind man."
The development team refers to the different open source Application Server, "I also installed three to four open source on the machine", reyNolds recalls.
But most members support Tomcat, so we decided to test this software with a new version of our website. The new version of this website will dynamically provide all the weather information of the city.
"When we show a web page, we found that tomcat is absolutely fast," Badnell said. "Because that test website is equivalent to 60% of our official website, we decided to continue - from WebSphere to Tomcat. We used to be uneasy, but now we find that you are correct, we are from there There is no regret again from the time. "
Transfer to Tomcat and Linux and use Intel chip-based servers, Weather.com discovers that their website has quickly increased system capacity, and this performance increased relatively low cost. "In our overall architecture, improve system scalability is very simple, just buy more machines and put the web server to go in. We bought 12 machines, so that the overall performance of the system increased by 30%. "TIM BOLSTER said. (TIM is Director.) "We no longer need to pay IBM open tickets (pay for WebSphere's license), and we have more elastic choices in deployment."
"In the general days, only for desktop applications, we have 30,000,000 database calls (website Oracle Databases)," Agronow said. "We can use Tomcat and open source software to handle these calls. The structural framework of this system gives us the ability. All server configurations are similar, so we can extend this system horizontally. As the number of visits increases, we only You need to add another server. "
Total, weather.com has 75 website servers, 12 servers are used to support desktop applications, 20 support for various other needs. The company has many developments and test servers. All added, there are 180 sets.
Technical Support
The software developers of the website are also very happy, Bolser said. "We like open source software is that you can see what the cloak is hidden," he said. "Business software If there is a vulnerability and is revealed, you must rely on suppliers to repair it, but if it is open source software or an open source community or you have the opportunity to solve this vulnerability. Because technology is often very curious, Access to more source code does make us feel more comfortable and safe, this is better than not good. "
Robin Bloor, an IT analyst in Baroudi Bloor, pointed out that open source community high quality technical support is actually a very common and extensive thing, especially those "flagship" open source software, such as Apache, Linux and Tomcat.
"Those who participated in the software created forms an online community, and they keep providing technical support," said Bloor. "Sometimes some specific questions, the person who will help you even write a code for you."
Agronow said that he will optimize the Tomcat software and the weather.com overall environment on the Intel P4 processor. "If optimization is successful, we can get better performance. I have a dissatisfaction with Tomcat, which seems to be optimized for the latest processor. We need speed, speed give us performance and traffic," he said . Weather.com is also working from the Oracle database to open source database MySQL.
Agronow said our IT Working Group is very clear that open source software is suitable for weather.com. "It makes us save money, and every time we turn to open source, we are more confident that we can succeed next time," he said.
Such self-confidence has been filled with IT staff, and Agronow said: "Now when I say to the senior manager to move from Oracle to mysql, they no longer ask me: 'Do you really have a credit code?' Ask me: 'When? ""
Break the FUD Group: Weather.com's Joey Reynolds, Jon Badnell, Dan Agronow, Jeff Cunningham, and Tim Bolser.
