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Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

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Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#91

Post by applfanboysbgon »

esseph wrote: post #46
ClarityJones wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arbitration is an inefficient and unproductive process. I suppose that may be what the parties chose, but the public will likely never know what happened and the problem will be allowed to reoccur again and again. Things like these are better resolved in courts, with res judicata, precedent, and visibility so that legislators can fix statutes where necessary.

> and the problem will be allowed to reoccur again and again You're already placing blame here. We don't know the details other than what Railway has said.

If the ToS was actually violated and the suspension was legitimate, they wouldn't have reinstated Railway's account after five hours or whatever it was. Their behaviour is already a mea culpa.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#92

Post by Oras »

dogscatstrees wrote: post #22
r_lee wrote: post #11

I think so. I'm a GCP user and I'm afraid of hosting workloads there now. I've heard too many nightmare stories, and I thought Google would be proper and thus not be infested with these kind of problems that cheaper providers are known for. Maybe AWS is the only player in town now? I don't know. Google doesn't instill confidence with these incidents, same with those cases of insurmountable bills caused by simple mist…

What about Azure?

Azure is a toy platform, not a real cloud. Too many changes, far from being reliable.

Unless imposed by employer to use, run a mile.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#93

Post by Oras »

solarkraft wrote: post #89

I’m surprised when I hear about anyone depending on GCP. Why would you do that? Seriously, what are some good reasons to choose GCP over vendors that have demonstrated to be much more reliable? Are they much cheaper than the alternatives? Do they have unbeatable features?

They offer $250k credit for startups, that's the only reason I can think of. You use them for a start, and stuck there.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#94

Post by fakedang »

lacker wrote: post #47

It's an especially awkward situation because Railway is a competitor of Google Cloud, with many third parties involved. So, I just think it will take them a little more time to figure out how to message things. To me, what it sounds like is that a Google Cloud system identified Railway as a misbehaving customer. Spam, hackers, that sort of thing. Often this happens for "platform as a service" companies, because Railw…

Railway's system for dealing with hackers is a $5/mo fee gate.

Railway plays around vibecoding as they go along, and their tech practices don't inspire confidence either. Unlike other PaaS like Render or Heroku, I doubt Railway has adequate rate-limiting to stop bad apples.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#95

Post by captn3m0 »

esseph wrote: post #50
farwaabbas wrote: post #2

Totally agreed the news like this makes me nervous too. For a high profile customer it feels like Google should give a clear explanation of what happened.

> For a high profile customer Are they really "high profile"? I've never heard of them until this incident or maybe the other one with the database. They just seem... Loud, publicly. And always about failure.

They publish some stats at https://railway.com/stats

72M deploys from 3M customers across 10M services in the last month.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#96

Post by esseph »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #91
esseph wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the problem will be allowed to reoccur again and again You're already placing blame here. We don't know the details other than what Railway has said.

If the ToS was actually violated and the suspension was legitimate, they wouldn't have reinstated Railway's account after five hours or whatever it was. Their behaviour is already a mea culpa.

I disagree. They could have done this to themselves and instead of fessing up, are placing the blame on an entity as a scapegoat.

Is that possible? Absolutely.

Has Google also done similar things before? Absolutely.

I certainly wouldn't bet my house on either possiblity.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#97

Post by applfanboysbgon »

esseph wrote: post #96
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ToS was actually violated and the suspension was legitimate, they wouldn't have reinstated Railway's account after five hours or whatever it was. Their behaviour is already a mea culpa.

I disagree. They could have done this to themselves and instead of fessing up, are placing the blame on an entity as a scapegoat. Is that possible? Absolutely. Has Google also done similar things before? Absolutely. I certainly wouldn't bet my house on either possiblity.

Given that Railway publicly boasted about running their own infra, revealing that they were completely and totally dependent on GCP is massively damaging to their PR, far more damaging than admitting they had a problem in their own infra. Their customers are using them under the pretense of not using GCP, so if they're just a proxy for GCP, they have no reason to exist. I seriously doubt they concocted such a self-damaging lie.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#98

Post by lesuorac »

cross wrote: post #84
zarzavat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopify has $11 billion dollars in revenue. I assume that buys them at least an email address of a human at Google. Nobody doubts Google's engineering ability. It's their soft skills that are lacking. Google is culturally unable to understand the concept of customers.

Xoogler here. This hits hard; right on the kidney. That is a huge problem at Google: "we're google; we know what you want and need better than you do." That and an unshakable confidence in their own infallibility. When I was there, I remember saying, "we do some cool stuff, but always remember that hubris is the death of empires."

Tbh, even if "you know what somebody wants better than they do" it's a moot point since people pay for what they _think_ they want.

Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?

#99

Post by quietsegfault »

mlmonkey wrote: post #33
ceejayoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any indication Railway has consented to such disclosure?

But Railway has been blaming GCP for the outage. Shouldn't GCP be given an opportunity to defend itself?

No, that’s what the money is for.
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