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Google Outage in Europe

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Re: Google Outage in Europe

#141

Post by remram »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #98
iso1210 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, downtime of google so far this year: More than 0 minutes. Downtime of my own server: 0 minutes. Of course I'm not trying to run a massively scalable service coping with millions of customers, because I don't need that.

You think that's how statistics works? Obviously it's possible to keep your own server running with 0 downtime. But you are exposed to a much higher risk of severe downtimes longer than the cloud provider would likely be. Be it hardware failure, grid, ISP, whatever.

To be fair, this is exactly how statistics work. The average downtime of self-hosted servers might be higher (arguably) but many people are under Google's yearly downtime (aka variance is high).

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#142

Post by DnDGrognard »

ddalex wrote: post #67
xcambar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything…

Can't speak for other companies, but this is covered in basic training at Google - if you're not authorized to speak on behalf of the company, you must make it clear when your writings may be mistaken or constructed to represent the company. Basically the company has specially trained people that speak on behalf of the company, and that message should not be confounded by personal opinions of other employees. For exa…

It's the same at all large companies - its CYA boiler plate.

Though I almost got to be the official spokesperson for British Telecom responding on the alt.2600 news group about the the Met police VMB hack - press office was cool but the internal security was not.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#143

Post by ihumanable »

michaelt wrote: post #118
tester34 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s still less downtime than your own server what makes you think so, actually?

In my experience, it's very easy to achieve high uptime through luck. If I only run a single server, and it has a 10% chance of failing in any given year, I have a 90% chance of achieving 100% uptime in a given year. In my experience it's also very easy to think you've got all your bases covered when actually you haven't. I'm protected against mains power failures by a UPS and a generator - but a UPS switchgear fault…

This so much.

And an excellent corollary to this is that when you have lucky 100% uptime there is no incentive to optimize mean time to recovery.

Sure the raspberry pi in your closet has been running fine for years, 100% uptime, but then a component fails. Do you have a replacement on hand? Are you continuously monitoring it to know it went down? The component failed at 3am, did it page you? Did you hop right out of bed to rush to fix it?

Single systems can have really nice uptime until they don’t. Then you are hoping that the people on hand can repair what’s going on after months or years of never having to do that. Mean time to recovery might be a week while you wait for new hardware or a few hours while you google some error message you’ve never encountered.

People can run their own systems if they want to, but they shouldn’t confuse good luck with rigorous engineering.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#144

Post by remram »

michaelt wrote: post #118
tester34 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s still less downtime than your own server what makes you think so, actually?

In my experience, it's very easy to achieve high uptime through luck. If I only run a single server, and it has a 10% chance of failing in any given year, I have a 90% chance of achieving 100% uptime in a given year. In my experience it's also very easy to think you've got all your bases covered when actually you haven't. I'm protected against mains power failures by a UPS and a generator - but a UPS switchgear fault…

I also have a personal dedicated server that never crashed or restarted this year. However I am not sure how much it was actually available. I know for a fact that there were multiple network issues at OVH. I also know that had my server been home, it would have been worse (Optimum residential is awful).

The server not failing is not the only outage mode.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#145

Post by remram »

i5heu wrote: post #87
iso1210 wrote: post #84

I do laugh at people that say "Using the cloud means less downtime than your own server", then things like this come along :D

Right? My private website on my RPI is running now 2 Years without a problem and only minimal downtime due to rebooting for the new kernels. It is amazing how much uptime you can achieve with a 5$ Computer in comparison to a 1730000000000$ (1,73 tera $) Company. Even if you compensate for dynamic content.

Maybe Google's servers are also running without a problem and you can't reach it for a different reason. Self-reported uptime is not a good measure of server availability.

Was your home internet available all of the time? How many times did you reboot your modem?

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#146

Post by Rebelgecko »

xcambar wrote: post #51
ddalex wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own People do absolutely NOT get fired over incidents. Making mistakes is human. An incident will prompt a review of the systems and safeguards in place to prevent such an incident, much like an airline incident investigation - basically "somebody fat-fingered it" is never the answer, postmortems are always blameless EDIT: now that I think of…

> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything…

Part of it is because the company asks us to. Part of it is because I think it's reasonable to tell people your biases, and it can avoid the situation where substantive conversation gets derailed by "gotchas". If I make a comment about how I think Google Meet has the best noise cancellation of any video chat software, even though I don't work on Meet or anything adjacent to it, it's still a bad look if someone can dig through my comment history and pull out a previous comment about how I work for Google.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#147

Post by handrous »

chrisseaton wrote: post #102
exikyut wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

139,995 employees at Google * 1,000,000 = $139,995,000,000 $140 billion dollars. On training. On the one hand... you know what, I'd love to work in an environment like that. Seriously. On the other hand... what's the argument you make to the CFO in support of this? Honest question, interested to hear answers.

I work part time in the Army. In the Army when you go from their equivalent of junior to mid-level they take you out of your job for eight months of dedicated personal development, before you start your first mid-level job. When you go to their equivalent of senior they take you out for a year . I don't know how much that costs all-in, including the salaries, instructors, facilities, but might be starting to approach…

Middle and upper management get there via connections and picking things up on their own. It's unsurprising that they don't want to be subjected to competition with lesser people who can "merely" be trained to do their job as well, or better.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#148

Post by deanCommie »

kroolik wrote: post #9

There were outages around the same time last year. Somebody in the HN thread commented back then that the employees evaluation and promotion window ends around december/eoy, thus more releases are made. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_services_outages

And this is why nobody serious should build on GCP.

Google's more interested in placating their primadonna engineers than solving customer problems.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#149

Post by riffic »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #126
deepstack wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More reason to promote for self-host, and decentralised systems like smtp, matrix.org, ActivityPub. The idea of having all the data and server concentrated in a few player such as google, amazon, ccp is not reliable for the digital operation of the planet.

The question is: should we trust small, underfunded, hobbyist servers more than large corporations that have a money-driven reason to maintain high quality of services?

for the average end user: heck no.

for those with budgets to hire server administrators (or pay for third-party managed services)? yes.

second category includes almost anyone with a large following like institutional users.

hell the incumbent social media service operators can white-label their existing software and sell this as a service.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#150

Post by riffic »

LadyCailin wrote: post #63
xcambar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Googler here, not speaking on the behalf of the company, my opinions are my own Why do employees at big tech names (FAANG et al.) are so often so cautious as to include this as a foreword everywhere? Twitter bios are full of that, for instance. It is crazy to me; who would expect anything else that our opinions being your own and nothing more? Who would expect that your word (with all due respect) is worth anything…

I work at a large tech company, and they do mention in the on boarding materials that we represent the company, so we should be careful in our social media profiles. My solution to this is to not associate my social media profiles with my employer. This is technically not really what we’re supposed to do, and I might have to change that approach at some point if I move high enough in the org to start getting attentio…

if they wanted to control this so bad they'd provision you a managed account like how email addresses are managed.
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