This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Highly misleading headline and article. The headline claims that all of GCP went down for 12h. The article claims that „an office in Frankfurt“ was unavailable. Both claims are wrong.
In reality, some services in the europe-west3-c zone experienced a 12h outage source.
Cloud: just someone else's computer.
But how does this happen? Surely Google has the ability to make highly available systems that are resistant to power going out at one of the three locations (as per the article).
From the incident report it seems the impact was limited to VMs in one DC in one region to be stopped, as the power was lost. And some service degradation in the region.
So not that much impact. Of course resources in this DC would stop working, but the rest of the region was still working properly. If you built your infra in this region in a resilient manner, your services should not have been impacted that much
That doesn't help if they have software that assumes it can reach all sites. I remember a few years ago AWS had a EC2 outage in eu-central-1 because of 1 of the Availability Zones went down and the service that allocates instances threw a 500 when it failed to get that AZ's capacity instead of just allocating the instances to the other 2 AZs.
I get how it's possible, but this is Google. Surely they have decades of experience at keeping a website up no matter what happens!
Companies are made up of people. Companies save money by firing the most expensive people, the most experienced. The ones left have a lot less experience.
You could also say its AWS. They also should have the experience, but mistakes happen
If only there was a way to keep files on a device you can keep in your home. Maybe even set up a closed system that you can access from everywhere without having to rely on Google's servers 24/7.
Oh wait, there is. Nevermind.
As much as I'm talking shit, I get it. At the end of the day convenience is a hell of a drug.
I was just thinking about this a little earlier.
People simply can't be bothered to learn how systems work (any kind, technical, financial, political), then bitch when it doesn't work the way they want or think it should.
I'm as guilty as anyone (especially finance). At least I try to not bitch about it too much, and work at keeping away from more complex stuff that I just don't understand well enough.
