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Google Cloud Is Down

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Google Cloud Is Down

#431

Post by azernik »

dltmrcd wrote: post #346
curiouscats wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure there are smart locks that don't rely on an active connection to the cloud. The lock downloads keys when it has a connection and a smartphone can download keys. This means they work even if no active internet connection at the time the person tries to open. If the connection was dead the entire time between creating the new key and the person trying to use the lock it still wouldn't work. If there ar…

It may not be worth the complexity to give users the choice. If I were to issue keys to guests this way I would want my revocations to be immediately effective no matter what. Guest keys requiring a working network is a fine trade-off.

You can have this without user intervention - have the lock download an expiration time with the list of allowed guest keys, or have the guest keys public-key signed with metadata like expiration time.

If the cloud is down, revocations aren't going to happen instantly anyway. (Although you might be able to hack up a local WiFi or Bluetooth fallback.)

Re: Google Cloud Is Down

#432

Post by alphabettsy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #172
stanfordkid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't use my Nest lock to let guests into my house. I'm pretty sure their infrastructure is hosted in Google Cloud. So yeah... definitely some stuff lost.

You have my honest sympathy because of the difficulties you now suffer through, but it bears emphasizing: this is what you get when you replace what should be a physical product under your control with Internet-connected service running on third-party servers. IoT as seen on the consumer market is a Bad Idea.

One of the reasons why I personally wanted a smart-lock that had BLE support along with a keypad for backup in addition to HomeKit connectivity.

Re: Google Cloud Is Down

#433

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

gundmc wrote: post #425
londons_explore wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discount seems way too small. I would pay a premium for a cloud provider happy to give 100 percent discount for the month for 10 minutes downtime, and 100 percent discount for the year for an hour's downtime.

Any cloud provider offering those terms would go out of business VERY quickly. Outages happen, all providers are incentivized to minimize the frequency and severity of disruptions - not just from the financial hit of breaching SLA (which for something like this will be significant), but for the reputational damage which can be even more impactful.

> Any cloud provider offering those terms would go out of business VERY quickly

Minimum spends and a 50,000% markup based on adding that term to your contract.

Re: Google Cloud Is Down

#434

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #332
w_s_l wrote: post #83

You know this reminds me of a bad taste that Google Sales team left when I asked for some of my billing that I was unaware of running after following a quickstart guide. AWS refunded me in the first reply on the same day! GCP sales rep just copy pasted a link to a self support survey that essentially told me, after a series of YES or NO questions that they can't refund me. So why not just tell your customers like it…

The thing that worries me most about Google Cloud and these billing stories is that I’m assuming if you chargeback or block them at your bank then they’ll ban all Google accounts of yours - and they’re obviously going to be able to make the link between an account made just for Google Cloud and my real account.

They WILL absolutely block and suspend all accounts indefinitely. They have terminated accounts for credit card failing transactions.

I really wanted to try out their new autoML but I was paranoid of entering my credit card and getting banned from Google

Re: Google Cloud Is Down

#435

Post by user5994461 »

jpmattia wrote: post #410
user5994461 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had something similar last year because of a core router fabric issue. A few years ago, there was a batch of new servers with buggy motherboards corrupting/dropping packets, can't begin to imagine how hard it was to diagnose. That's in own datacenters, not cloud.

> can't begin to imagine how hard it was to diagnose. Yeah, when it happened to me, it completely threw me for a loop. We had reports of corruption in video files, which started the debug cycle. It was shocking when we isolated the box causing the issue. But I guess your bigger comment has to be right: About the only way to have this sort of error is at the hardware level, because basic CRC checking should otherwise…

Keep in mind that hardware run with a firmware. What is called a hardware issue can actually be a software issue.

It wasn't just one box for us. Basically, the part number was defective (motherboard NIC), every single one that was manufactured. This affected a variety of things, since servers are bought in batch and shipped to multiple datacenters, damn impossible to root cause.

CRC can be computed by the OS (kernel driver) or offloaded to the NIC. I think it's unlikely for buggy CRC code to shipped to a finished product, it would be noticed that nothing works.

Re: Google Cloud Is Down

#436

Post by milesward »

MrAureliusR wrote: post #429
stanfordkid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't use my Nest lock to let guests into my house. I'm pretty sure their infrastructure is hosted in Google Cloud. So yeah... definitely some stuff lost.

Everyone talking about security and not replacing locks with smart locks seems to forget that you can just kick the fucking door down or jimmy a window open.

Or just sawzall a hole in the side of the house...

Re: Google Cloud Is Down

#438

Post by marcinzm »

enneff wrote: post #399
kerng wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you are downvoted - seems like a reasonable insight and explanation for the drop in quality and weird decisions Google is making recently.

It’s not insightful at all. Just one intern’s very brief observations of something way more complicated and nuanced than is deserving of such a dismissive comment.

I'll take brief comments that shed partial light on something over no comments at all and no insight at all.
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