On that Google outage... The interwebs are filled with the rantings of people either raging at Google or poking fun at Google for their 30 to 60 minute outage last night. Google has explained it in a blog post, and apologized to its users.
Me? I continue to be astounded at the reliability that Google (and a few others, notably Amazon) have been able to achieve for applications at that scale. I've worked in that world a bit – my last job was with ServiceNow, a company with a moderate scale cloud application, but certainly not nearly the scale of, say, GMail. Add to that reliability the fact that Google supplies GMail to personal users for free (that is, no direct charge), and you've got something really quite remarkable.
Could they do better on reliability? Certainly, though not by much – Google's uptime record isn't all that far from perfect. Do they deserve rage or mocking? I don't think so...
Their automated system detected the problem and reverted the bad configuration while the techs were still scratching their heads.
ReplyDeleteI'm *so* impressed.