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Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

status.cloud.google.com

211–220 of 341 posts

Re: Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

#211
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential question: does Google allow employees, not directly tasked with it, to represent the company online as they wish? Most companies I know of have a strict ‘do not speak for the company’ policy.

As kyrra says below, you're in the clear if you state that this is just your opinion. Naturally, prefacing something terrible as "just your opinion" doesn't make it fine. In my case, Cloud PR knows me, but I also knowingly risk my job (I clearly believe I have good enough judgment in what I post). If Urs and Ben think I should be fired, I'm okay with that, as it would represent a significant enough difference in opin…

To add my own story. I have made comments about other teams services on hacker news before. I've been contacted by the SRE responsible for the service I commented on asking me to correct what I said. Luckily no reports for leaking info. :)

Whenever I talk about the inner workings of Google I try to reference to external talks, books, or white papers to go along with my comments. Luckily a lot has already been set externally about how Google works.

Re: Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

#213
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential question: does Google allow employees, not directly tasked with it, to represent the company online as they wish? Most companies I know of have a strict ‘do not speak for the company’ policy.

As kyrra says below, you're in the clear if you state that this is just your opinion. Naturally, prefacing something terrible as "just your opinion" doesn't make it fine. In my case, Cloud PR knows me, but I also knowingly risk my job (I clearly believe I have good enough judgment in what I post). If Urs and Ben think I should be fired, I'm okay with that, as it would represent a significant enough difference in opin…

That’s...that’s some petty fucking shit. I didn’t go through your comments but considering your email is in your profile, someone really had to have a hard-on to report you for leaks.

I would love to understand the though process of someone going out of their way to remove someone’s livelihood from them because of a comment on HN (when applied in a normal circumstance of adding additional information or correcting a misconception — I’m clearly not saying that bonehead comments shouldn’t have consequences.)

Re: Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

#215

Does anybody else feel like there have been a lot of outages in recent months? And I don't mean Google -- I mean lots of others too (I seem to recall CloudFlare, Facebook, etc.)... are they really increasing or are we just hearing more about them? Seems a bit odd.

That's more or less inevitable. As complexity increases (which it does naturally, if there's no effort to decrease it) at some point it begins to outstrip the limits of human understanding.

I've been saying this repeatedly (and downvoted for it repeatedly): if you want truly reliable systems, use simple, boring technology, and don't fuck with it after it's set up, and run it yourself. 99.99% of all these outages are due to screwing up something that already works, something that if it was in your own rack you could just leave alone and not touch at all.

Re: Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

#216
post #135

When choosing a big cloud provider people forget that it's many orders of magnitude more complicated to run something at Google scale then to maintain one single server. For example the whole Stack overflow website runs on one or two servers. World of Warcraft also used to run on one single (blade) server. Chances are one server will be good enough for most use cases. And if you don't want to have it in your closet t…

>World of Warcraft also used to run on one single (blade) server.

This is... kind of true, but not really. For a single realm, general game interactions in the open world might have been hosted on a single blade, but there are a lot of support systems that do as much work, or more, that were not. The databases with all of the character information, login servers, instance servers, etc. etc. etc.

But even if you look at just the game server portion, there was a blade for every realm - you can't say World of Warcraft as a monolithic entity ran on a single blade server.

(I'm also not sure if the general game servers for a realm were only on one blade - my understanding is that each "continent" was it's own blade - Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Outland, etc.)

Re: Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

#218
post #215

Does anybody else feel like there have been a lot of outages in recent months? And I don't mean Google -- I mean lots of others too (I seem to recall CloudFlare, Facebook, etc.)... are they really increasing or are we just hearing more about them? Seems a bit odd.

That's more or less inevitable. As complexity increases (which it does naturally, if there's no effort to decrease it) at some point it begins to outstrip the limits of human understanding. I've been saying this repeatedly (and downvoted for it repeatedly): if you want truly reliable systems, use simple, boring technology, and don't fuck with it after it's set up, and run it yourself. 99.99% of all these outages are…

My horribly out of date system works, therefore I should never strive to improve it or god forbid update it (since that involves “fucking with it” in ways that can break it from version to version)? That gets you technical debt and that’s not fun.

Re: Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

#219
post #136

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but I'm not in SRE, oncall, etc.). As the updates to [1] say, we're working to resolve a networking issue. The Region isn't (and wasn't) "down", but obviously network latency spiking up for external connectivity is bad. We are currently experiencing an issue with a subset of the fiber paths that supply the region. We're working on getting that restored. In the meantime, we've remov…

Tangential question: does Google allow employees, not directly tasked with it, to represent the company online as they wish? Most companies I know of have a strict ‘do not speak for the company’ policy.

Google employees are commenting publicly and on Hacker News all the time. If there is a policy of not speaking publicly about the company, this has been the most blatantly ignored policy ever.

Re: Google Cloud networking issues in us-east1

#220

Does anybody else feel like there have been a lot of outages in recent months? And I don't mean Google -- I mean lots of others too (I seem to recall CloudFlare, Facebook, etc.)... are they really increasing or are we just hearing more about them? Seems a bit odd.

Now that you mention it, I just realized why. The current few months are the intern season!
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