The Incremental Approach: Go To Market in Less Than Half the Time - Part 4
Everyone is Hopin' It'll All Work Out
Where We Left Off: My team and I have a solution to get the client's website back online: Turn the CDN on right now. But this requires the client to update the DNS on their side, and there's no guarantee this will work. How about we activate the homepage only and worry about the rest of the site later? We need to do something because national news media has caught wind of this outage. Time is not our friend, here.
“Damn it,” said Ben. “It’s down again.”
Tom shrugged.
“Hold on,” Terri said. “Since we already did so much work to get the home page up, I don’t think it would be that much work to get the press releases section up. It’s just two component, a listing and a details.”
Ben started clicking on his keyboard again. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll take the listing and you do the details.” He looked at me, still typing. “Give me an hour to get something up.”
Tom rolled his eyes. He didn’t care much for the hero vibe that Ben tended to give off. “That doesn’t help us, Superman,” he said. “It’s going to take weeks to get the rest of the site coded, and we can’t swap it over until then.”
We all looked at each other. Each second ticking by felt like an hour.
The phone started ringing. I looked at the call display and closed my eyes, feeling tired. It was the customer.
“Hey man,” I said.
“The site came up for a minute,” he said. “Then it crashed again. What the hell are you guys doing over there?”
“Everything we can,” I said.
“Do you have a plan?” He asked.
There was a pause.
Then Tom held up a finger, his eyes wide. He took the marker from me.
“Uh… YES!” I said. “We’ve got something we’re going to try. Can you give me a few more minutes?”
He hung up without answering. That’s not a good sign.
“What do you have for us, Tom?” I asked.
“Look,” he said, drawing a new box with ‘CDN’ written into it. “We can use CDN rules to route traffic to the new site for the home page and,” he continued, pointing at Terri and Ben, “when you guys get the news section up and running, we can add that in, too.”
“Actually,” said Ben, his face lighting up. “I’ve been looking at running code at the edge,” he exclaimed. “You can’t do too much, but you can easily do basic conditional logic, including which origin server to pull traffic from, and how long to cache it.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means,” said Terri, smiling. “That we can get phase one of this website out the door tonight!”
With a whoop, she, Ben, and Tom exchanged high-fives.
“Okay, okay,” I said, laughing. “I think I understand. Can you guys get that new section coded that fast?”
“It might not be perfect,” said Ben, “But it’ll be close enough to get us through the weekend.”
“Hold onto your butts,” said Tom as he clicked away on his keyboard. “That’s it!” He stood up, turned to the whiteboard and drew a double line from the red ‘traffic’ box to the words ‘home page’ under the ‘new site’ section. “New home page is live.”
My eyes went wide. “Were we ready for that?” I asked, panicking a bit.
“It should be fine,” said Tom. “It’s hooked to same Agility CMS content as the old site, it’s just using a newer framework.”
“Same with the news and press releases, section,” said Ben, clacking away loudly on his laptop. “There, just checked in the listing component. Terri, if you could merge that when your done on the details, I’ll send the logic on the CDN for you to adjust, Tom.”
Within the hour, my team had launched the homepage and news section, and the website was back up again.
I dialed the customer. He picked up immediately, “Joel!” He shouted. “It’s back up! How did you do that? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “My team came up with a plan to implement the new site that we’ve been building incrementally so you can take advantage of the new performance capabilities.”
“You guys finished the whole site?” he asked, incredulously. “I thought it was going to take months! Does this mean you’re done the project?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Consider this the early delivery of phase one. I’ll get back to you on Monday with a new project plan for rolling out everything else.”
“Hey man,” he replied, “If this thing stays up all weekend through this announcement, you can make it wait until Tuesday.”
I laughed and hung up.
Looking at my watch, I realized it was nearly 7pm. My team had worked late on a Friday just to help out this customer.
“I can’t tell you guys how proud I am of you all,” I said, feeling grateful. “You found a really innovative solution to a tough problem under pressure.”
They all looked at each other, grinning.
“Now you can buy us all dinner,” said Ben, holding out his fist between the other two. They all held out their fists.
“No argument here,” I said. “I’m feeling hungry, and I didn’t even do any of the work.” As we walked to the parking lot, I pulled out my phone and opened Spotify.
"A little Loverboy to kick off the weekend?"
About the Author
Joel is CTO at Agility. His first job, though, is as a father to 2 amazing humans.
Joining Agility in 2005, he has over 20 years of experience in software development and product management. He embraced cloud technology as a groundbreaking concept over a decade ago, and he continues to help customers adopt new technology with hybrid frameworks and the Jamstack. He holds a degree from The University of Guelph in English and Computer Science. He's led Agility CMS to many awards and accolades during his tenure such as being named the Best Cloud CMS by CMS Critic, as a leader on G2.com for Headless CMS, and a leader in Customer Experience on Gartner Peer Insights.
As CTO, Joel oversees the Product team, as well as working closely with the Growth and Customer Success teams. When he's not kicking butt with Agility, Joel coaches high-school football and directs musical theatre. Learn more about Joel HERE.
