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Gmail Services Global Outage

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Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#81

Post by skj »

close04 wrote: post #76
DangitBobby wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global outage implies everyone on the planet. Outages globally would imply what you've stated.

Someone's in a really pedantic mood today. The real life use of the expression contradicts your personal definition (try googling it and tell me what you come up with). It is widely used in reporting and accepted by everyone who's not in the mood to argue personal definitions. Then again... Schrodinger's outage. Until everyone checks some people are not affected. Hence, never global. Right? But honestly now, are you…

> Someone's in a really pedantic mood today.

Hint: it's you

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#82

Post by nabakin »

sbjustin wrote: post #39
close04 wrote: post #33

Global does not mean "affecting absolutely everyone around the globe (or disc, for the flatearthers out there)". Affecting a "significant subset of users" that are spread around every continent is global and it shows it's not one specific DC, link, or ISP that was affected. The fact that you didn't experience the disruption means absolutely nothing and it's ridiculous to even suggest it does. Especially since there a…

I bet you're fun at parties.

This is HN, not Reddit. Please try to keep the attacks to a minimum.

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#83

Post by andyjohnson0 »

gtt wrote: post #40
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been happily using Thunderbird for 10+ years. Supports Windows, Mac, and Linux natively. https://www.thunderbird.net

In my experience it crashes a few times a week and have abandoned feel. Is there any modern fork?

Strange. I can't remember that last time it crashed on me, and I have it running almost all the time on my work and personal machines (both Win10, talking to gmail and fastmail respectively via imap).

A while back Mozilla announced that they were migrating development to an independent team. I don't know much about that, but my impression as a user is that quality hasn't been affected and it might even be getting more love. I was happy to donate some money to the project last time they did a fundraiser.

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#84

Post by dgacmu »

Already__Taken wrote: post #80
null_content wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't tolerate houses collapsing out of nowhere, brakes failing over the course of normal usage and planes falling out of the sky during routine flights. But for some reason, we HAVE TO tolerate software crapping itself once a year? I don't accept this logic. This is just a sign of how sloppy the industry has become. This is the reason your phone becomes obsolete after 2 years, whereas your car can continue to run…

We wouldn't tolerate those things if we all used the one plane, car and house. That's where this comparison falls down.

The e-mail equivalent of your house falling down is data loss. This is unavailability, which is more analogous to losing your keys and not being able to get in for 30 minutes.

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#86

Post by close04 »

skj wrote: post #81
close04 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone's in a really pedantic mood today. The real life use of the expression contradicts your personal definition (try googling it and tell me what you come up with). It is widely used in reporting and accepted by everyone who's not in the mood to argue personal definitions. Then again... Schrodinger's outage. Until everyone checks some people are not affected. Hence, never global. Right? But honestly now, are you…

> Someone's in a really pedantic mood today. Hint: it's you

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. [0]

> Hint: it's you

My comment may or may not be wrong but it was still on the topic of the article. I'll let you judge your own.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#87

Post by zzzcpan »

gizzlon wrote: post #17
x3tm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the main factors that could lead to such a situation?

From the first SRE book [1]: "The error budget stems from the observation that 100% is the wrong reliability target for basically everything (pacemakers and anti-lock brakes being notable exceptions). In general, for any software service or system, 100% is not the right reliability target because no user can tell the difference between a system being 100% available and 99.999% available. There are many other systems…

Not how it works. If you service has that 99.999% availability and you get a single unavailability event in a year, that's already 5 minutes of downtime completely independent from all other events that users may or may not experience, there is almost no chance of overlap between them. Users definitely notice that. And worse, events are going to be even less frequent than that and ever more noticeable and on top of that you are going to underestimate actual unavailability by at least an order.

So, can we get to the level where unavailability is actually an unnoticeable noise? Yes, but definitely not the way Google does things. I'd generalize that Google is absolutely not the place to look for ideas on reliability.

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#89

Post by CydeWeys »

mattzito wrote: post #79
null_content wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't tolerate houses collapsing out of nowhere, brakes failing over the course of normal usage and planes falling out of the sky during routine flights. But for some reason, we HAVE TO tolerate software crapping itself once a year? I don't accept this logic. This is just a sign of how sloppy the industry has become. This is the reason your phone becomes obsolete after 2 years, whereas your car can continue to run…

I think this is a false equivalency. If we're talking about "service unavailability", planes break all the time. Houses have to be vacated because of flooding, fire, insect infestation. Brakes do fail. Just like with software, we accept a certain level of risk in exchange for cost/convenience efficiencies (e.g. we don't want our planes to fall out of the sky, but we're okay with getting stranded in phoenix for 24 hou…

Also, brakes contribute to service unavailability. Brake pads need to be replaced on average every 50k miles, which takes the average driver 4 years. And let's say the average length of time your car is at the mechanic's to fix brakes is 3 days. That's 3 days of unavailability every 4 years just for brake pad replacements, or 99.8% availability (two nines!), just because of brake pad repairs. Add in all the other required car maintenance, and depending on the reliability of the vehicle, and you might be down into one nine territory.

Gmail going down is like your car being in the shop. It's not equivalent to a plane crashing; the equivalent there would be the entire contents and history of your Gmail account being unrecoverably deleted, and you yourself had no backups. Of course, I'd still much rather have that happen a hundred times than be in one fatal plane crash ..

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#90

Post by notyourwork »

zzzcpan wrote: post #87
gizzlon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the first SRE book [1]: "The error budget stems from the observation that 100% is the wrong reliability target for basically everything (pacemakers and anti-lock brakes being notable exceptions). In general, for any software service or system, 100% is not the right reliability target because no user can tell the difference between a system being 100% available and 99.999% available. There are many other systems…

Not how it works. If you service has that 99.999% availability and you get a single unavailability event in a year, that's already 5 minutes of downtime completely independent from all other events that users may or may not experience, there is almost no chance of overlap between them. Users definitely notice that. And worse, events are going to be even less frequent than that and ever more noticeable and on top of t…

I think you have a misconception on what actual reliability is for more products and services. 99.999% is a solid service, 99.99999% is a hard to achieve target for enterprise software.

To say Google is not the place to look for reliability is a pretty comical statement.

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