XC Skies has long been a proponent of transparency. We describe our techniques, reply to all technical questions in full disclosure and make the website fully discoverable.
By making the site "discoverable" that means our interfaces are exposed and can be discovered by savvy web developers. Knowing how to call our API (program interfaces) means some people can take advantage of XC Skies' services by bypassing our website and writing scripts to "scrape" and "rip-off" the data we provide to users who support our efforts via small subscriptions. The individuals can and have been identified, but solutions to preventing abuse on the site could potentially impact some pilots who are legitimately using our services. This conundrum is hard to balance.
We'll be implementing schemes to thwart the free-loaders of XC Skies while hopefully not causing problems with legitimate subscribers.
Another issue is the abuse of our free 30 day trial subscriptions. Anyone can signup freely and use XC Skies for 30 days, no questions asked and no obligations attached. This also means some users who find XC Skies indispensable, yet don't want to support it at a $4.95 / month fee, can just keep creating new users each month. Again, we know who these folks are, but what to do? These users account for a significant usage of the website. Do we (as XC Skies and the greater soaring community) put up with this abuse as a cost of business or do we take action to lock down the free 30 day trial process?
Additionally, many users share their accounts. The price points for subscriptions are modest with little to no profit based on the average user's activity. Sharing accounts cuts into the utility of the services for everyone. Yet another Q that will be addressed...
We'll be addressing these issues shortly too.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
XC Skies Growing Pains
Like any popular service that starts from a grass roots effort, at some point a critical mass is reached and the sheer volume of transactions starts to stress the core ideas. In the case of XC Skies, the project started as a prototype to see if value could be gleaned by parameterizing coarse NWP model output and framed in a way that could be consumed by the average pilot using new visualization techniques via web applications. XC Skies gained traction quickly.
Long story short, a large pilot community gathered around the water cooler to talk about how these new tools could be leveraged and improved. Out of these candid and critical conversations a new way of viewing soaring forecasts emerged. With pioneers like Dr. Jack and Oliver Lichtei, innovative iterations on a theme gave rise to what we all come to expect as a constant resource for the soaring community, myself included.
When these services become interrupted for whatever reason, it's frustrating for everyone. In the case of XC Skies, we grew out of our modest computing footprint last fall which prompted a migration to one of the best Utility Cloud Computing environments available: Openhosting.com. These guys are top-notch and I've been deploying projects within their environment since they started business in 2003.
The cost of cloud computing reached a price point which made XC Skies and other compute intensive projects possible to successfully leverage the Cloud environment at an affordable rate. We are on the cusp of really great things to come with utility-based cloud computing. But with this, there will be growing pains.
On Dec 4, 2011 our migration into the cloud was completed with several side effects that were quickly sorted out. There are still a few minor remaining issues, but will likely be resolved with the new version of XC Skies apps coming soon. On Jan 26, 2012 some implementation issues caused intermittent issues with the deployment of XC Skies. By Friday afternoon, a stable solution was put back in place. A few minor network config issues surfaced over the next 2 weeks which resulted in short periods of point and route forecasts from plotting consistently. On Feb 10, we made a final upgrade to a very stable implementation which we feel is highly scalable and can meet the demands of the 2012 soaring season, which by our estimates will be the most demanding year yet for XC Skies.
So why all these comments? Simple. Full disclosure and transparency of our efforts to provide a better product in a more robust environment. As the post title notes, these are growing pains, which is a good thing for everyone who has found value in XC Skies with their continued support.
We greatly appreciate all that our community has given to this project and we're extremely excited to start releasing a suite of new products and innovative ways of getting at soaring forecast data quickly and effectively from all types of devices (PC, Phone, Tablet, etc). This next era for XC Skies will provide tremendously more value to our soaring community than we had previously thought possible.
Thank you for the continue support and we look forward to rolling out our new ideas from the feedback each and every one of you have contributed over the last few seasons.
-Chris Galli and the XC Skies Team
Long story short, a large pilot community gathered around the water cooler to talk about how these new tools could be leveraged and improved. Out of these candid and critical conversations a new way of viewing soaring forecasts emerged. With pioneers like Dr. Jack and Oliver Lichtei, innovative iterations on a theme gave rise to what we all come to expect as a constant resource for the soaring community, myself included.
When these services become interrupted for whatever reason, it's frustrating for everyone. In the case of XC Skies, we grew out of our modest computing footprint last fall which prompted a migration to one of the best Utility Cloud Computing environments available: Openhosting.com. These guys are top-notch and I've been deploying projects within their environment since they started business in 2003.
The cost of cloud computing reached a price point which made XC Skies and other compute intensive projects possible to successfully leverage the Cloud environment at an affordable rate. We are on the cusp of really great things to come with utility-based cloud computing. But with this, there will be growing pains.
On Dec 4, 2011 our migration into the cloud was completed with several side effects that were quickly sorted out. There are still a few minor remaining issues, but will likely be resolved with the new version of XC Skies apps coming soon. On Jan 26, 2012 some implementation issues caused intermittent issues with the deployment of XC Skies. By Friday afternoon, a stable solution was put back in place. A few minor network config issues surfaced over the next 2 weeks which resulted in short periods of point and route forecasts from plotting consistently. On Feb 10, we made a final upgrade to a very stable implementation which we feel is highly scalable and can meet the demands of the 2012 soaring season, which by our estimates will be the most demanding year yet for XC Skies.
So why all these comments? Simple. Full disclosure and transparency of our efforts to provide a better product in a more robust environment. As the post title notes, these are growing pains, which is a good thing for everyone who has found value in XC Skies with their continued support.
We greatly appreciate all that our community has given to this project and we're extremely excited to start releasing a suite of new products and innovative ways of getting at soaring forecast data quickly and effectively from all types of devices (PC, Phone, Tablet, etc). This next era for XC Skies will provide tremendously more value to our soaring community than we had previously thought possible.
Thank you for the continue support and we look forward to rolling out our new ideas from the feedback each and every one of you have contributed over the last few seasons.
-Chris Galli and the XC Skies Team
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