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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?

#31

Post by graemep »

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…

> I thought Google would be proper and thus not be infested with these kind of problems that cheaper providers are known for.

These sorts of things have happened before with Google and the other expensive providers.

Are cheaper providers known for doing this? I would have thought they would be less lively to, as they are smaller and therefore every customer is relatively more important to them, and they are therefore more likely to check before turning services off.

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

#32

Post by r_lee »

ceejayoz wrote: post #14
r_lee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, especially since this didn't seem to be exactly "private" where it was anything specific, it was just some kind of automated system without a human in the loop

But shouldn't that be disclosed to Railway, and not the public? If they had someone running a botnet on compromised accounts there, for example. If Railway isn't satisfied with the explanation, they're able to say so publicly, yes?

if it wasn't something specific to their setup, it should be disclosed publicly, because this is a catastrophic incident that makes you think it could happen to you as well, and there's no way to know what could trigger it

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

#33

Post by mlmonkey »

ceejayoz wrote: post #16
hun3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With consent, yes.

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?

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

#34

Post by ceejayoz »

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?

Is that what you'd want your vendors to do?

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

#35

Post by tomComb »

I can't believe that readers of HN actually think that that is how it does or should work.

Google/GCP can only make very general statements and in this case we want more than that.

They need to tell Railway and Railway needs to tell us, or Railway can tell us that Google is refusing to tell them.

Either way, we need to hear about this from Railway.

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

#36

Post by ceejayoz »

r_lee wrote: post #32
ceejayoz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But shouldn't that be disclosed to Railway, and not the public? If they had someone running a botnet on compromised accounts there, for example. If Railway isn't satisfied with the explanation, they're able to say so publicly, yes?

if it wasn't something specific to their setup, it should be disclosed publicly, because this is a catastrophic incident that makes you think it could happen to you as well, and there's no way to know what could trigger it

> if it wasn't something specific to their setup

They're a web host; it could be any number of plausible mundane things that triggered automated action. This is a big recurring problem for any shared hosting provider.

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

#37

Post by PrairieFire »

gdulli wrote: post #23

We already know the explanation. It's fundamental to their business model and continued existence to automate everything, false positives be damned, and they don't care about all the people who roll snake eyes on a given day. Because everyone just stays and keeps using them.

Yep. Google doing Google things. Not everyone stays and just keeps using them though, we're actively planning to remove GCP from our primary workloads now and will cut our spend to about 1/10 of current as we keep them in the stack as a cold multi-cloud failover target only.

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

#38

Post by ClarityJones »

ZiiS wrote: post #17

I really don't see how they can. The business and usage details of their clients are confidential. We have their word that ToS where violated, I don't really think they should say more. This needs to go to arbitration.

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.

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

#39

Post by trollbridge »

ZiiS wrote: post #17

I really don't see how they can. The business and usage details of their clients are confidential. We have their word that ToS where violated, I don't really think they should say more. This needs to go to arbitration.

There's a reason we used to have courts with public records. Public records and transparency are a good thing. Binding arbitration has destroyed all of that.

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

#40

Post by trollbridge »

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…

Well, I would host workloads on GCP... provided I could easily move them elsewhere and I just treat them as disposable.
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