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Google Outage in Europe

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Re: Google Outage in Europe

#111
post #92
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…

Especially when it's not an opinion.

In fairness, 'opinion' is a horrendously vague and ill-defined word. It does double duty as (i) 'normative value' and (ii) 'personal understanding of the descriptive facts', which two senses are constantly confused - for example right here.

That's why we constantly get "it's just my opinion" used in reference to type-ii opinions (personal understanding of descriptive fact), when it's only really appropriate to type-i opinions (normative value).

Many conversations would be far clearer if it were abandoned in favour of more precise language, IMPUOTDF.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#112
post #76
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

November 11 is a public holiday in US. And it seems it has in recent years became a company holiday in many companies too. May be that break in established over many years cadence of workday and holidays plays a role here, like say affecting smoothness of support transition between US-EMEA-APJ.

Veterans Day is not a day off for US Googlers.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#114
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Google is currently processing multiple terabits of traffic per second using several billion dollars' worth of distributed infrastructure.)

And yet it doesn't mean his RPi-powered website needs to ever sustain that kind of traffic, so he doesn't have to take the additional risk of running a distributed system.

In contrast, in the cloud you typically take on the risk of the underlying distributed platform (optimized for managing thousands of VMs, etc) even though you only need a single machine for yourself.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claim was "It’s still less downtime than your own server" Claim disproven

That claim was a direct snippet from your original comment. So unless you meant that you laugh at people who are talking specifically about your personal server, I'd say you are being selectively literal.

Cloud kool-aid drinkers say "The cloud is always better"

I say that in many cases your own server is better. My company runs its own on-prem confluence, it's been taken down for updates on a regular basis at a known maintenence time. That's far better than losing it because a cloud based one was hosted on GCP this morning when we actually need the data

Obviously in many other cases the cloud is better. You wouldn't want to server a million cusotmers across the world from a single server in your own basement. That's not the only model.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#117
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the evaluation period was over more than two months ago Excellent time to slack off a bit, make a few mistakes, then come next eval you can point to a marked improvement over the intervening six-to-nine months!

The line of logic this thread has followed so far suggests there will be a reason for a Google outage every month of the year.

Couldn‘t have phrased it any better.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still less downtime than your own server and you have hundreds of engineers 24/7 ready to diagnose and fix issues

>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 can cut my power even without a mains power outage. My server has dual power supplies and network cards - but that won't help me if a clumsy worker sent to replace the server above mine unplugs mine by mistake. And so on.

If I think I'm doing a better job than a billion-dollar corporation with hundreds of thousands of servers, does that mean I am? Or is it more likely I'm fooling myself?

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#119

ITT: "My rasperry has been up for 2 years with almost no downtime, what is up with these suckers?"

It's valid criticism for projects that don't need the scale or features that cloud-based solutions offer.

A single machine won't give you the same level of scaling and management features, but also won't have hundreds of distributed moving parts that could break and take your service down as a side-effect.

Re: Google Outage in Europe

#120
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Google is currently processing multiple terabits of traffic per second using several billion dollars' worth of distributed infrastructure.)

Actually it's not, and that's the problem
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