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Google Outage in Europe

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Re: Google Outage in Europe

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they get fired instead, well done ha.

Comments like this make me wonder if people really expect engineers to be fired because of an outage? I do not work at Google, but none of my workplaces would fire engineers because of a failure. Mistakes happen. As long as they are not repeated, everything is good. If your company fires people in situations like this, run away and never look back.

You're totally right and the SRE book by Google goes over this - the company's culture does not allow firing people for outages. If you're somewhere this still happens, run away (or you'd better be getting paid more than top-end ICs at Google.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#162
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Like some sort of workspace? Google could make one. I wonder what they'd call it?

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the army is a cost center! The workers have some money shaved off their salary to pay for an army that allows delinquents and half-disabled to pew-pew guns in the forest, leaving them in peace. It's not comparable to a productive entreprise that needs to build things for people or perish. For instance, if Google fails and cant profit, it cant just shoot at their client until they pay. Your organisation can.

> It's not comparable to a productive entreprise that needs to build things for people or perish.

Well we had to build an Army to win against fascism in the Second World War or we all would have perished.

And 'perished' means literally dead or subject to fascism, not just going out of business.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#165

Outage reports in UTC, amazing! ( glares at AWS )

I want to smack whomever invented time zones. Everyone is bad at them. Trading desks, international trade offices, space related offices all have a set of clocks on the wall because even really smart people just suck at figuring out time zones. I even use https://everytimezone.com/ in lieu of a set of clocks. What a needless complication. I wish we could all just switch to UTC and stop daylight savings time.

I can't imagine anyone taking kindly to a change as big as eradicating time zones. Get rid of DST, yes, but only if the U.S. goes up an hour (the extra sunlight at 6pm during DST is nice).

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yet all these googlers breached it immediately in the first sentence by naming their company...

Sarcastically, "I'm a googler, opinions my own" reads a lot like "I'm a googler, just so you know".

I didn't want to emphasize on that on the first comment yet to be honest, I find it pedantic because it's pointless, legally speaking.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. People do not realize just how advanced the reliability infrastructure of those services is. Things like diesel power generators have been baked into cloud datacenters for what, a decade now? Probably longer. Show me your alternative power source when the power goes out (and power does disappear, everywhere, eventually).

Diesel generators have been baked into my on prem equipment room for at least 40 years

For you average person working in an average office if the power goes out you're not going to be working anyway, so it doesn't matter if your server is offline too.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have some external ping test running continuously? If not, you really have no idea.

Of course, how else would I know the exact failure times, my service monitoring only polls every few minutes. That doesn't help me with my knowing how my service is performing though, I'm not offering a ping service.

More importantly, I do know I had an error loading twitter at Thu 11 Nov 04:17:01 GMT 2021, however my websites (and google and hackernews) were working. At 17:53:01 GMT Twitter took over 2 seconds to load it's first http page, far beyond the normal 400ms. Google took 23 seconds to load this morning, BBC News just 0.071.

On the other hand I also need to provide services which can't cope with outages measured in milliseconds. Good luck with complaining to a cloud provider that your traffic vanished for 4 seconds. Those services thus have multiple connections on independent hardware and circuits with no single point of failure

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#170
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Like some sort of workspace? Google could make one. I wonder what they'd call it?

I’m sure Google wonders the same thing, given that it’s had like five different names over the years.
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