Using JanRain and their service RPXNow

Very soon now I hope to offer JanRain connections on all the Codewi.se sites. But I take this as a cautionary tale:

The Dumbest Decision I’ve Ever Made

The code for our Open ID responder is spiraling, with just about every conditional setting in there you can imagine for the various providers out there. I’ll save you the grumbling rant, but coding up Open ID stuff is utterly mind-numbing frustration. And while I’m doing this, I’m not recording videos… creating product.

Then I read about JanRain and their service RPXNow. I’ll jump on this and say that as far as service providers go – they have been just fine. Their service is generally up 99.999999% of the time, which is pretty outstanding for a SaS provider.

In addition they offer access to other providers: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo… and they do all the “heavy lifting” for you in terms of understanding which standards incantation goes to which provider.

I plumbed it in, it worked immediately and I was stoked! And then all hell broke loose…

Let me just preface this by saying of all the failure points in your business – you really don’t want the door to be locked while you stand behind the counter waiting for business. No, let me rephrase that: you don’t want the door jammed shut, completely unopenable while your customers wait outside – irate that you won’t let them in.

You don’t want that ever. Not even once, not even for 10 seconds. We’re very, very small and this kind of thing will sink us.

3 times the RPX people changed their API on us and our authentication system went down. We were able to fix it within 20 – 30 minutes each time; once, however, was at 5 in the morning.

RPX as a service has gone down 3 times in the last year. This last time (about 4 months ago) it was down for about 4 hours – effectively shutting our doors for us. This isn’t a small provder – there are many, many, many businesses that rely on them to authenticate their users.

It happens. Services go down and we are patient. As a developer and user I need to learn how to say that. As a business owner you can go f*** yourself if you think I’ll use you again.