I think this is larger than just GAE. http://internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm It seems like large portions of the internet are down.
Add Dropbox to that list.
App Engine down
61–70 of 139 posts
Re: App Engine down
#62I'm really happy I don't host in the cloud. How quickly are the cost savings of cloud computing obliterated by PR, customer service, and system administration time when an outage like this occurs?
I think there is an interesting debate to be had here. When your site goes down at the same time as Tumblr/Reddit/one of the big guys, the damage might not actually be that high. In the minds of many, "the internet" is probably quite broken.
Depends on the site. Most of the traffic we cater to is not referrer driven.
Re: App Engine down
#63Meanwhile... Gmail etc are working quite fine. So the claim that if you build on GAE you "take advantage of the same infrastructure used for Google services!!" starts to ring a bit hollow.
I wonder if anyone ever believed this claim to be true...
Re: App Engine down
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely hosting yourself exposes you to just as much, if not more risk? Problem in the datacentre where you're co-lo'd, or one of your servers blows up? I think people not trusting the cloud is similar to how people feel safer driving their cars then taking a plane. The stats say the plane's safer, but people prefer being in control. People like the idea of being in control of their servers, even if that means there's…
We're coloed across three datacenters spanning the US (one might be in TO I think) and if a datacenter were to go down, we have a hot backup that's no more than 12 hours stale. The only real manual maintenance that we've got is a rolling reimaging of servers based on whatever's in version control, which usually takes a few hours twice a year, but we'd probably do that if we were in the cloud anyway. When you can scri…
But a DNS based failover is still going to take an hour or so to propagate right (given that a lot of browsers/proxies/DNS servers don't respect TTL very well at all)? And then you end up with a system with stale data, and the mess of trying to reconcile it when your other system comes back up.
I'd take an hour long Appengine outage once a year over that anytime!
Re: App Engine down
#65It's time we remembered the whole strength of the internet was that it was distributed and we avoided introducing single points of failure. We have ended up using vast amounts of infrastructure for no reason other than developer convenience (often with respect to security), when having local direct connections is often more suitable than shooting everything into the cloud.
Which is better? Having a day of downtime each year, or not launching at all?
Re: App Engine down
#66i think now its back again live. atleast for me.
Re: App Engine down
#67I'm really happy I don't host in the cloud. How quickly are the cost savings of cloud computing obliterated by PR, customer service, and system administration time when an outage like this occurs?
Surely hosting yourself exposes you to just as much, if not more risk? Problem in the datacentre where you're co-lo'd, or one of your servers blows up? I think people not trusting the cloud is similar to how people feel safer driving their cars then taking a plane. The stats say the plane's safer, but people prefer being in control. People like the idea of being in control of their servers, even if that means there's…
It really depends on how many servers and how good your sys admins are. If you have 1 server in a cheap colo, then yes, the cloud is probably better. If you have a GOOD hosting provider, and build out a redundant at every tier cluster, you can easily beat the major cloud providers' uptime.
We run about 11 client clusters across ~250 servers across 3 data centers in the US and Europe. Each of our client's uptime is very very close to 100%, and we've NEVER lost everything, even for 1 second.
Re: App Engine down
#68I'm really happy I don't host in the cloud. How quickly are the cost savings of cloud computing obliterated by PR, customer service, and system administration time when an outage like this occurs?
It's funny, i've got the exact opposite reasoning : it's those moments where i can really appreciate the fact that i'm using the cloud : 1/ I don't have to spend the night debugging or replacing broken hardware 2/ It doesn't cost me any time, any additional resource, any support upgrade, any hardware. 3/ No one can blame me or anybody in my team for the fact that it's not working. I don't feel like i'm lacking contro…
You customers will not be mollified if you tell them that the service you sold is down due to a subcontractor failure.
Re: App Engine down
#69Meanwhile... Gmail etc are working quite fine. So the claim that if you build on GAE you "take advantage of the same infrastructure used for Google services!!" starts to ring a bit hollow.
Well http://developer.android.com/ is down, so google does use GAE for some of its properties?
Re: App Engine down
#70I'm really happy I don't host in the cloud. How quickly are the cost savings of cloud computing obliterated by PR, customer service, and system administration time when an outage like this occurs?
It's funny, i've got the exact opposite reasoning : it's those moments where i can really appreciate the fact that i'm using the cloud : 1/ I don't have to spend the night debugging or replacing broken hardware 2/ It doesn't cost me any time, any additional resource, any support upgrade, any hardware. 3/ No one can blame me or anybody in my team for the fact that it's not working. I don't feel like i'm lacking contro…
If you have paying clients, they WILL blame you and your team for the fact it's not working. They don't care who/what the underlying infrastructure is.
Also a good hosting company will handle identifying/fixing/replacing bad hardware for you.