I guess the network admin who skipped the classes on Network Fundamentals, has moved on from their recent placement in OVH, to Facebook, then to Google.
Next stop AWS, firewall maintenance division?!
Google Outage in Europe
121–130 of 186 posts
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
I agree completely with that added nuance. Cloud infra is definitely overused and is sometimes seen as the only option these days, even for the simplest of projects. Having your own metal is often times much more convenient and cheaper. Plus it's much more enjoyable to work with.
My only gripe was with your gross over-simplification that read like "hurr durr, my server hasn't gone down this year, so self-hosting has better uptime than Google". It's such an unnecessary and baseless argument.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#123Earlier 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…
> On the recent FB outage, there was an employee posting inside information on reddit - media companies just took it at face value and ran around with it reporting as it was what FB itself was saying about the outage.
To be fair, I think the media would have done that even with a "speaking only for myself" disclaimer.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#124Earlier 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…
Would you say: "I live in [city], opinions are my own", or "I am married to [person], opinions are my own"?
If no, why are you doing this for the company you're trading skills and time against money?
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#125Earlier 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…
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).
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
As time passes, the more big cloud providers there are, and the more complex they individually get (more products). Assuming the chance of an outage is actually static. If there is one (highly reliable and trusted) provider with five products one year, and three providers with ten products the next year, the chance of you seeing an outage has gone way up because of surface area.
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?
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
I agree completely with that added nuance. Cloud infra is definitely overused and is sometimes seen as the only option these days, even for the simplest of projects. Having your own metal is often times much more convenient and cheaper. Plus it's much more enjoyable to work with. My only gripe was with your gross over-simplification that read like "hurr durr, my server hasn't gone down this year, so self-hosting has…
Vast vast majority of arguments you hear on HN is that it's impossible to run your own equipment. That's as ridiculous as saying you could run dropbox off a raspberry pi, but tends to get pushed to the top, and the schadenfreude when these events inevitability come along is too good to miss.
Every few months another major outage of another cloud provider hits the headlines, meanwhile millions of small companies have no problem with the uptime of their 'legacy' services.
I was at a farm a few weeks ago, the farmer had a server in a closet. It did break on occasion, when there was a power outage. His desktop and internet broke too, so what would the point in his server working.
If it was hosted on google it wouldn't have been working this morning, despite his computer being fine.
If you build your business processes around accepting failure, it's not a problem. It's far easier to keep at least one out of 3 machines online for 99.999% of the time than to keep a single service running for the same time.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#128I 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.
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Re: Google Outage in Europe
#129ITT: "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.
I feel like you are selling the cloud short for SMBs. The majority of my career has been spent working for shops that have their own datacenters or colo. It's so freaking cheap to run a huge service it's not even funny. And it's a dream to have so much compute and storage floating around that you can "waste" it without even thinking -- it's already paid for!
However, when your small the economics flip. You want to run as little as possible as cheap as possible. And a load balancer pointing at a two asgs in different availability zones is by far the cheapest way to get something production ready on the internet. You can go from your garage to a 100M business and probably never need to graduate from this architecture.
Re: Google Outage in Europe
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
As time passes, the more big cloud providers there are, and the more complex they individually get (more products). Assuming the chance of an outage is actually static. If there is one (highly reliable and trusted) provider with five products one year, and three providers with ten products the next year, the chance of you seeing an outage has gone way up because of surface area.
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.
Disclaimer: am Googler.
Self-hosting is a good option, especially when mixed with multi-cloud offerings.
The big rub is that it's really hard to approach the same level of availability the cloud offerings already give you. Depending on work-load, self-hosting is typically more expensive.
This is why the SRE book talks about availability budget. You can't have 100% uptime, so how much do you want to pay to get close to it?