Web operations

Web operations is a domain of expertise within IT systems management that involves the deployment, operation, maintenance, tuning, and repair of web-based applications.

With the rise of web technologies since mid-1995, specialists have emerged that understand the complexities of running a web application. Earlier examples of IT operations teams exist, such as the Network Operations Center (NOC) and the Database Administration (DBA) function.

Web systems demand their own specialized skills. Web applications are unique in many ways, including:

• Their use by a distributed, often uncontrolled, user base
• The many independent networks between end users and the data center from which content is served
• The three-tiered model of web, application, and database components (such as LAMP environments consisting of Linux, MySQL and either Perl or PHP)
• The way in which web pages are delivered as atomic transactions, requiring additional technologies (such as cookies) to associate sequences of pages into a user interaction.

Web operations teams are tasked with a variety of responsibilities, including:

• The deployment and instrumentation of web applications
• The monitoring, error isolation, escalation, and repair of problems
• Performing performance management, availability reporting, and other administration
• Configuring load-balancing and working with content delivery networks to improve the reliability and reduce the latency of the system.
• Measuring the impact of changes to content, applications, networks, and infrastructure

Typically, web operations personnel are familiar with the TCP/IP stack, the http protocol, HTML page markup, and Rich Internet applications (RIAs) such as AJAX, Adobe Flash and the like.

Conferences and Events

Web Operations was first coined as a term in 2003 as part of the Interop conference's Web Ops Summit. In fact, its main use may in fact be to drive conference attendance over conventional terms such as system or network administration.

Velocity 09 web operations conference run by O'Reilly media

Structure 09 web infrastructure conference run by GigaOM

Keynote Live! @ Velocity 10 web operations conference run by Keynote Systems and co-located with Velocity

Web Operations Software

Hyperic HQ open source monitoring and management for web operations

Keynote - The Mobile & Internet Performance Authority Keynote on-demand test and measurement solutions help connected companies and their web operations departments know precisely how their web sites, content, and applications will perform on actual browsers, networks, and mobile devices long before their customers and business are impacted.