My fiancé Rhonda and I have picked up and moved to Seattle so that she can pursue a job at Boeing working on their 787 Dreamliner. We opted to make the cross-country drive rather than fly. This series of posts will be a recap of our drive. Here’s our adventure…

Day 3

Day 3 we left smelly Lexington heading for Fort Collins, CO. The drive through the second-half of Nebraska was much like the first-half, boring and uneventful except for a burnt-out headlight. As mentioned in a previous post, my “get up and go” personality doesn’t like not moving forward, so fixing it was not on the books.

The scenery changed almost immediately after passing the Nebraska-Colorado line. What was mostly drab plains and farmland became colorful rolling hills. Colorado was the first state that we saw wind turbines (though my memory may be blurring the states…). For whatever reason I am mesmerized by these and would point them out to Rhonda whenever I spotted them. We saw almost as many turbines as we saw pronghorn antelope.

We planned for a short drive this day so we could visit New Belgium Brewing in the afternoon. Prior to the brewery though we checked in to our hotel and grabbed some lunch. We ate at Wild Boar Coffee right next Colorado State University. Wild Boar’s food was awesome and their beer list was equally impressive. I had Odell Brewing Company’s Myrcenary Double IPA and Rhonda had Odell’s 90 Shilling Ale.

After lunch we made our way to New Belgium. Not wanting to leave the dogs cooped up in the truck for the 90-minute brewery tour we decided to hang out in the tasting room. Rhonda volunteered to drive so I could partake in New Belgium’s numerous offerings. Blue Paddle was still my favorite of the day but Drew’s Ale and Abbey were equally tasty. My least favorite was Sara’s Red brewed with beets, licorice, fennel, and rosemary. I agreed with my server that the fennel and licorice were a bit redundant, especially since I like neither. Unlike breweries in Georgia, New Belgium is able to sell direct from the brewery including growlers. We filled up our growler with Blue Paddle, picked up a 12-pack of Sunshine and bombers of Le Terroir and Imperial Berliner-Weisse, as well as a shirt for Rhonda and one for a friend back in Atlanta.

The highlights of the drive were the beautiful scenery of Colorado and of course our stop at New Belgium Brewing.

Total driving on day 3 was only 300 miles through Nebraska and Colorado.

My fiancé Rhonda and I have picked up and moved to Seattle so that she can pursue a job at Boeing working on their 787 Dreamliner. We opted to make the cross-country drive rather than fly. This series of posts will be a recap of our drive. Here’s our adventure…

Day 2

After watching it rain and hail for about 30 minutes Tuesday morning it finally settled down and I examined the tarp over the truck bed. I commended myself for such a fine jimmy-rigging job and after a quick breakfast we hit the road. Thanks to Google Maps we missed our exit onto I-70 and a few U-turns later we were on the right road.

The drive through Missouri and Nebraska was boring and uneventful. It was windy, testing the limits of our tarp. After feeling as if the truck were going to take off from the road after a big gust we pulled over and removed the tarp for the rest of the drive. It was this stop when we realized we may have under-packed for the trip, not realizing how cold it was in the rest of the country. Stopping for gas, I was confused that Plus was the cheapest gas, but soon realized it was because of the added ethanol (Thanks government subsidized agriculture!). We made decent time thanks to the 75 MPH speed limit through the state.

Our destination for day 2 was dinner with Kenneth, a long-time friend and co-worker, in Kearney, NE. Of course I picked a beer stop for us; Thunderhead Brewing Company. I had first heard about Thunderhead on The Brewing Network and was surprised that little, ol’ Kearney could have such a cool sounding brewpub. With over 10 beers on tap I had two samplers of their beers. Their fruit-flavored wheats were tasty but their cream ale and dry stout were my favorites. From The Brewing Network show I learned Thunderhead uses corn in several of their beers and you can certainly taste it in their cream ale. Catching up with Kenneth was fun. Rhonda had heard plenty of stories about Kenneth and she enjoyed finally meeting him. After dinner we were off to our hotel in Lexington, NE, another 30 miles down the road. Lexington was unremarkable except for the smell…

The highlight of the drive was the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, an archway extending across I-80. According to Kenneth it’s deemed a “temporary” structure through a loophole in the Interstate Highway System program, allowing its construction.

Total driving on day 2 was over 600 miles through Missouri, the corner of Iowa, and Nebraska.

My fiancé Rhonda and I have picked up and moved to Seattle so that she can pursue a job at Boeing working on their 787 Dreamliner. We opted to make the cross-country drive rather than fly. This series of posts will be a recap of our drive. Here’s our adventure…

My fiancé Rhonda and I have picked up and moved to Seattle so that she can pursue a job at Boeing working on their 787 Dreamliner. We opted to make the cross-country drive rather than fly. This series of posts will be a recap of our drive. Here’s our adventure…

Day 1

Our first day we left Atlanta heading for St. Louis. The drive through Georgia and most of Tennessee was a familiar one that I’ve done several times having gone to the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, TN for the past 6 years. We stopped for lunch in Nashville at Jack’s BBQ. Their pork and beef brisket sandwiches are awesome. Jack’s came highly recommended and lived up to the hype. After lunch we spent the next hour in the Home Depot parking lot jimmy-rigging a tarp across the back of the truck for the impending rain we saw in the forecast. My “get up and go” personality was very frustrated by this seemingly waste of time that was eating into our driving time. Once we finally had the right combination of rope, carabiners, and bungee cords we hit the road again. The next few hours were uneventful and we arrived in St. Louis around 7:00 local time.

Dinner in St. Louis was spent catching up with our friends Rich and Marilyn who had moved to St. Louis a few years back. We arrived to an open bottle of Schlafly Reserve barleywine and the Big Green Egg heating up. We tied up the dogs to a tree in the backyard and relaxed with Rich and Marilyn and their two sons Ian and Evan. Evan only hung out for an hour or so before his bedtime and Ian stayed up late until about 8:30. We talked about our move, the drive, Seattle, St. Louis and of course…beer. Rich is an avid Sweetwater fan so we brought him a case of Sweetwater’s staple 420 Pale Ale, and bombers of Happy Ending and Mean Joe Bean. (Sweetwater doesn’t distribute to Missouri…) The Schlafly Reserve barleywine was very tasty, not as hoppy or sweet as some, making it very drinkable. We moved on to lighter fair after that, having my first taste of New Belgium’s Blue Paddle pilsner and some Schlafly pale ale. Blue Paddle is amazing.

In between beers we marveled at the Big Green Egg, discussed grilling and BBQ’ing, and compared and contrasted Jack’s BBQ’s 6 different BBQ sauces. Dinner was chicken wings, pork chops, and kebobs, all delicious. After dinner Ian went to bed, we watched some TV and played with Rich’s latest toy, a green laser. He learned about it on his recent safari to South Africa where their guide used it to point out stars at night. As soon as we have a permanent address, I’ll be buying one myself!

We left for the hotel around 10:00 staying in a nearby Staybridge Suites. It was my first stay in an extended stay property and the extra room was enjoyable for the dogs. Unfortunately that night it stormed and the dogs kept us up half the night.

The best sights of the drive were Nickajack Lake just past Chattanooga and the first spotting of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Total driving on day 1 was just over 500 miles through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri.

Recently I’ve been looking at options to improve the performance of our websites in certain regions of the world, specifically China. While there are an infinite number of ways to improve performance a pretty basic one is to reduce the physical distance between users and the website. This means if our users are in China, we need to run our website in China or as close as we can get.

To get a feel for how our website would perform if it was hosted in region I setup a test to compare a U.S. hosted website and an in-region hosted website, in this case in Amazon Web Services EC2’s Singapore location. Throwing another hat in the ring, I decided to test the same U.S. website but delivered via Akamai. For those who don’t know, Akamai has a global content delivery network (CDN) providing accelerated network delivery for static and dynamic content. This gives us the following test resources:

1. A static resource served from the East coast of the U.S.
2. A static resource served from the East coast of the U.S. but delivered by Akamai.
3. A static resource served from Amazon’s Asia Pacific region in Singapore.

The resource is the same static 30KB image in each case. Using a monitoring service, I sampled each resource every 5 minutes from Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The test ran for a little over 3 weeks. Without further ado, here are results…

Response Times

Average response times over the 2 weeks were:

1. Origin - 3.49 seconds.
2. Akamai - 1.73 seconds.
3. EC2 - 0.66 seconds.

From these numbers you can see how much of an impact distance can have and even more so how much of a positive impact Akamai can have on delivering your content. In this case the physical distance “as the crow flies” between the origin and the same content through Akamai is the same but Akamai can greatly increase performance over the “normal internet”.

Availability

Average availability over the 2 weeks were:

1. Origin - 99.90%
2. Akamai - 99.25%
3. EC2 - 99.92%

These numbers might seem low for serving a static image but are typical of what we’ve seen for China. Akamai’s availability is surprising as its the lowest of the lot.

Conclusion

The test results certainly support the hypothesis that reducing the distance between a website and its users will result in better performance. This is a function of the “speed of light problem” and reducing the number of hops between the two points. Reducing the number of hops would also improve availability by reducing the points of failure in between.

To summarize, no big surprises here, moving your applications and data closer to your customers can substantially improve the performance of your applications. Amazon’s availability regions in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific greatly reduce the barrier to deploying your applications globally and making for a better customer experience. This, of course, assumes your applications can be deployed in multiple locations and not impact data or transaction integrity…this is easier said than done. If you absolutely can’t move host your applications globally, Akamai can certainly help deliver your website faster. I expect we would see an even better improvement combining Akamai and an in-region hosted application.