And you are here why?

First class on AA is a lot better than their cattle-car service. A *lot* better. Oodles better. But then again, having a pre-frontal lobotomy without anesthesia is better than flying cattle-car nowadays. All that said, AA First is not really all that good in absolute terms. Its a lie-flat bed, and they " make the bed for you ", which sounds a lot cooler than it is - they basically put a wee mattress on the lie-flat seat.  The " lie-flat " seat is, admittedly, a lot better than the one in Business, but that is only because AA has the patented " lie flat in business class, but by flat, what we mean is lie kind of flat in two possible positions, neither of which is actually comfortable.  Or flat " seats. And the food. Oh my. The "food". Its not bad, really, but in the end its exactly the same damn food that they serve in Business, except that they bring it ' a-la-carte ' (yes there are quotes around it.  And yes, I put them t...

So you've got a cloud-based service.  Good for you!  I bet its brilliant,  is brilliantly fault-tolerant 'cos of Erlang/OTP, and is going to make you Pots o' Money!  That is, of course, assuming that you have prepared yourself for the inevitable "Oh S**t!" moment, when It Goes Down.  Herewith a couple of pointers to help you prepare for everything not working exactly the way it is supposed to (Servers die?  really?)… 1) Make sure that you understand your entire system .  Done?  Good, now make sure that all of your developers understand the entire system.  Specialization might be good (and don't get me wrong, weed-whackers are *very* useful little tools, especially when you get into the weeds :-)  ), but if they don't grok the big picture, well, you're hosed.  Capturing vast quantities of scoring data could be really useful for GUI updates, and might be easy to implement from an API perspective, but if your persistence layer...