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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?

#41

Post by okdood64 »

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…

Would you be okay with GCP making public issues you encounter with your account?

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

#42

Post by r_lee »

ceejayoz wrote: post #36
r_lee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

a huge account like theirs should not be subject to automated actions like that.

an entire gcp project deleted along with its persistent disks.

how does that make any sense? nobody thought to call them or anything

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

#44

Post by fidotron »

tomComb wrote: post #35

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.

It's entirely plausible Google won't tell Railway without an NDA to prevent them disclosing exactly what set it all off.

The bigger point though is Google really need to flag any business account as not subject to these suspensions until checked into by several humans. Back when I had a team that used a lot of App Engine they would even call us when we caused all their pagers to go off, and then conspire to keep the lights on while things got fixed. It's sad they have ended up like this.

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

#45

Post by r_lee »

okdood64 wrote: post #41
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…

Would you be okay with GCP making public issues you encounter with your account?

if it's some automated behavior, yes. I'd like to know what it is, why it exists, how it works (how to avoid triggering it) and what they're doing to make sure it never happens again

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

#46

Post by esseph »

ClarityJones wrote: post #38
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.

> and the problem will be allowed to reoccur again and again

You're already placing blame here.

We don't know the details other than what Railway has said.

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

#47

Post by lacker »

It's an especially awkward situation because Railway is a competitor of Google Cloud, with many third parties involved. So, I just think it will take them a little more time to figure out how to message things.

To me, what it sounds like is that a Google Cloud system identified Railway as a misbehaving customer. Spam, hackers, that sort of thing. Often this happens for "platform as a service" companies, because Railway themselves probably do host some spammers and hackers, and they have their own systems for dealing with it.

So, it's quite possible that according to the Google team, Railway violated the terms of something or other, and according to the Railway team, they did not, and now everyone has to argue about it.

But who knows, this is just me guessing based on some experience running a PaaS that itself was running on top of AWS.

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

#48

Post by jarym »

tomComb wrote: post #35

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.

I think there’s been far too many Google/GCP ‘suspensions with no human in the loop’ that Google does need to put out a statement about their practices.

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

#49

Post by roxolotl »

tomComb wrote: post #35

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.

Of course it doesn’t work this way but why shouldn’t it? It doesn’t because Google is a massive company and could kill dozens of Railways before they notice an issue to their bottom line. However in a world where companies care I’d expect them to make a statement.

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

#50

Post by esseph »

farwaabbas wrote: post #2

Totally agreed the news like this makes me nervous too. For a high profile customer it feels like Google should give a clear explanation of what happened.

> For a high profile customer

Are they really "high profile"?

I've never heard of them until this incident or maybe the other one with the database.

They just seem... Loud, publicly. And always about failure.

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