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Gmail Services Global Outage

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Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#11
post #6

As someone working on a mail service of my own, this is heartening to see. Even Google messes up sometimes.

Yup. And that's by design. Stability is asymptotic and increasingly expensive to reach toward 100%. There's a very intentional "this is good enough" point.

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

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And that's by design. Stability is asymptotic and increasingly expensive to reach toward 100%. There's a very intentional "this is good enough" point.

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

Well, the "good enough" point is reached when the cost of improving the reliability of the service is more than people would pay for that improved reliability.

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#15
Semi-related, but can anyone suggest good open source email client? I'm working on several computers with macos/linux and Gmail isn't slow only on my deep learning rig, so I'm looking for something to replace it.

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#17
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And that's by design. Stability is asymptotic and increasingly expensive to reach toward 100%. There's a very intentional "this is good enough" point.

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 in the path between 
   user and service (their laptop, their home WiFi, their ISP, 
   the power grid…) and those systems collectively are far less 
   than 99.999% available. Thus, the marginal difference 
   between 99.999% and 100% gets lost in the noise of other 
   unavailability, and the user receives no benefit from the 
   enormous effort required to add that last 0.001% of 
   availability.

   If 100% is the wrong reliability target for a system, what, 
   then, is the right reliability target for the system? This 
   actually isn’t a technical question at all—it’s a product question.."
[1] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/introductio...

https://landing.google.com/sre/books/

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And that's by design. Stability is asymptotic and increasingly expensive to reach toward 100%. There's a very intentional "this is good enough" point.

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

Well, I would say that the complexity of complexity is exponential.

In the aerospace industry, to get that last percent of a percent, 2 completely independent implementations of everything are used. Then to get another decimal, you add 2 more implementations and a consensus algorithm. Then of course you add static/unit/api/integration/stress/fuzz test suits for each implementation. Then test the tests. Then have a human run each test as the "second implementation" of the CI system. And so on, and so on. Each new decimal "9" cost multiple time more in human resource alone.

Then take into account the "productivity loss" of all those process and you need yet more poeple to progress as fast. Adding more people to a project has a diminishing return. After a while you can spend the entire GDP of the world and you wont be able to add another availability decimal point.

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#19
post #15

Semi-related, but can anyone suggest good open source email client? I'm working on several computers with macos/linux and Gmail isn't slow only on my deep learning rig, so I'm looking for something to replace it.

Basic HTML Gmail isn’t bad! https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?hl=en

Re: Gmail Services Global Outage

#20
post #15

Semi-related, but can anyone suggest good open source email client? I'm working on several computers with macos/linux and Gmail isn't slow only on my deep learning rig, so I'm looking for something to replace it.

Thunderbird works well for me. Interfaces with GMail IMAP. Has a nice quick filter and all the usuals (filtering, folders, labels).

The calendar interfaces with your Google calendar too (with the Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar add-ons).

Available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

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