[HN Gopher] Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Ongoing Incident in Google Cloud
        
       Author : sd2k
       Score  : 212 points
       Date   : 2023-02-27 13:47 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (status.cloud.google.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (status.cloud.google.com)
        
       | uniformlyrandom wrote:
       | 05:41 - 06:26 PT, 45 min total.
       | 
       | Not great, not terrible.
        
         | throwaway892238 wrote:
         | Yep. Of course there's no detail yet so we don't know what
         | exactly was affected. All we can see is "Multiple services are
         | being impacted globally" and a list of services (Build,
         | Firestore, Container Registry, BigQuery, Bigtable, Networking,
         | Pub/Sub, Storage, Compute Engine, Identity and Access
         | Management) but there's no indication of what _specifically_
         | was impacted. Could you still see status for your VMs, but not
         | launch new ones? Was it mostly affecting only a couple regions?
         | No idea. All we know is they 're now below four nines in
         | February for a handful of critical services.
         | 
         | Let's take a gander at incident history:
         | https://status.cloud.google.com/summary
         | 
         | Cloud Build looks bad... three multi-hour incidents this year,
         | four in fall/winter last year.
         | 
         | Cloud Developer Tools have had four multi-hour incidents this
         | year, many last fall/winter.
         | 
         | Cloud Firestore looks abysmal... Six multi-hour incidents this
         | year, one of them 23 hours.
         | 
         | Cloud App Engine had three multi-hour incidents this year, many
         | in fall/winter last year.
         | 
         | BigQuery had three multi-hour incidents this year, many in
         | fall/winter last year.
         | 
         | Cloud Console had five multi-hour incidents this year, many in
         | fall/winter last year. (And from my personal experience, their
         | console blows pretty much all the time)
         | 
         | Cloud Networking has had _nine incidents this year_ , one of
         | them was _eight days long_. What the fuck.
         | 
         | Compute Engine has had five multi-hour incidents this year,
         | many last fall/winter.
         | 
         | GKE had 3 incidents this year, multiple the past winter.
         | 
         | Can somebody do a comparison to AWS? This seems shitty but
         | maybe it's par for the course?
        
           | Rebelgecko wrote:
           | It's weird, I did a cursory search and can't find people
           | complaining about that 8 day long networking issue. I wonder
           | if the latency was just _barely_ out of SLO so people didn 't
           | notice? Or since it was a telecom problem, maybe it was part
           | of one of the recent undersea cable outages so people weren't
           | surprised enough to remark on it? Or maybe I'm just not
           | searching well.
           | 
           | (full disclosure, work at Google but not on cloud stuff)
        
           | joatmon-snoo wrote:
           | Ex-GCP here.
           | 
           | This is a pretty reductionist summary, e.g. the 8-day Cloud
           | Networking incident root cause:
           | 
           | > Description: Our engineering team continues to investigate
           | this issue and is evaluating additional improvement
           | opportunities to identify effective rerouting of traffic.
           | They have narrowed down the issue to one regional telecom
           | service provider and reported this to them for further
           | investigation. The connectivity problems are still mostly
           | resolved at this point although some customers may observe
           | delayed round trip time or longer latency or sporadic packet
           | loss until fully resolved.
           | 
           | Still a big problem product-wise, but you're looking at a
           | global incident history view without any region/severity
           | filters.
           | 
           | The corresponding AWS service health dashboard makes it much
           | harder to view this level of detail, but is also actually
           | useful for someone asking "is product $xyz which I depend on
           | in region $abc currently down or not"
        
       | lokl wrote:
       | mail.google.com showed error messages for me intermittently
       | during the past hour.
        
         | asicsp wrote:
         | discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34955906
        
         | jakedata wrote:
         | https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/5ML14k...
         | 
         | They claim the Gmail specific issues are resolved. We shall
         | see...
         | 
         | Feb 27, 2023 2:03 PM UTC We experienced a brief network outage
         | with package loss, impacting a number of workspace services.
         | The impact is over. We are investigating and monitoring.
        
       | typaty wrote:
       | https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg Even the
       | public apt key for signing Google's cloud packages is unavailable
       | (returns 500 for me). This is insane
        
         | eik3_de wrote:
         | Google cloud bugtracker bug:
         | https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/270782614?pli=1
        
         | nicholasklem wrote:
         | This key was 500 some hours before the incident started, I hope
         | it's unrelated.
        
           | typaty wrote:
           | inb4 it turns out an intern was tasked with updating the apt
           | key, which brought a cascading outage of all their services
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | roseway4 wrote:
         | Downloading the key has been erroring since at least ~5pm PT
         | yesterday, 2/27. It's likely unrelated. Though I'd be
         | unsurprised if the recent layoffs contributed to the situation.
        
         | chedabob wrote:
         | Currently being tracked here:
         | https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse/issues/961
        
       | kkielhofner wrote:
       | As has happened many times throughout history (back to mainframes
       | and thin clients of the 90s) there are swings/trends in how
       | infrastructure is hosted.
       | 
       | Listening to the "All In Podcast" yesterday even those guys were
       | talking about revenue drops in the big cloud services and noting
       | we're currently in the midst of a swing back to self-hosting/co-
       | location/whatever thinking and migrations out.
       | 
       | IMHO those building greenfield solution today should take a hard
       | look at whether the default approach from the last ~10 years "of
       | course you build in $BIGCLOUD" makes sense for the application -
       | in many cases it does not.
       | 
       | It also has the added benefit of de-centralizing the internet a
       | bit (even if only a little).
        
         | ctvo wrote:
         | AWS is a 75 bln a year business still growing 20%+ YoY. It'll
         | break 100 bln this year. I would examine the numbers yourself.
        
           | kkielhofner wrote:
           | I have - and the numbers show that much of the big cloud
           | growth is in AI services. The "we need to throw in AI
           | somewhere" concurrent trend is heavily bolstering what would
           | other wise be much more drastic retractions in growth.
           | 
           | I would argue as the AI trend (eventually) wanes and many AI
           | startups and projects within existing companies inevitably
           | eventually fail to materialize the much longer and more
           | general trend of migration out of $BIGCLOUD will be more
           | drastic and obvious.
           | 
           | I don't buy individual stocks but I would happily bet a
           | dinner on big cloud growth showing substantial
           | reductions/losses in coming years as the overall situation
           | stabilizes.
        
             | ctvo wrote:
             | > I have - and the numbers show that much of the big cloud
             | growth is in AI services. The "we need to throw in AI
             | somewhere" concurrent trend is heavily bolstering what
             | would other wise be much more drastic retractions in
             | growth.
             | 
             | Can you share where you got this? Which numbers? I didn't
             | think AWS (or any cloud provider) released details of their
             | operation at that level of granularity.
        
         | knorker wrote:
         | Revenue drop? Google Cloud is still growing 30-40% year on
         | year.
        
           | rcme wrote:
           | AWS also had 20% revenue growth last quarter.
        
         | outworlder wrote:
         | > IMHO those building greenfield solution today should take a
         | hard look at whether the default approach from the last ~10
         | years "of course you build in $BIGCLOUD" makes sense for the
         | application - in many cases it does not.
         | 
         | When one buys a house, they should take a hard loo at whether
         | the default approach of paying for utilities makes sense,
         | versus generating their own power.
         | 
         | While that's a bit snarky, the reasoning is similar. You can:
         | 
         | * Use "bigcloud"(TM) with the whole kit: VMs, their managed
         | services, etc * Use bigcloud, but just VM or storage * Rent VMs
         | from a smaller provider * Rent actual servers * Buy your
         | servers and ship to a colo * Buy your servers and build a
         | datacenter
         | 
         | Every level you drop, you need more work. And it grows(I
         | suspect, not linearly). Sure, if you have all the required
         | experts (or you rent them) you can do everything yourself. If
         | not, you'll have to defer to vendors. You will pay some premium
         | for this, but it's either that, or payroll.
         | 
         | What also needs to be factored in is how static your system is.
         | If a single machine works for your use-case, great.
         | 
         | One of the systems I manage has hundreds of millions of dollars
         | in contracts on the line, thousands of VMs. I do not care if
         | any single VM goes down; the system will kill it and provision
         | a new one. A big cloud provider availability zone often spans
         | across multiple datacenters too, each datacenter with their own
         | redundancies. Even if an entire AZ goes down, we can survive on
         | the other two (with possibly some temporary degradation for a
         | few minutes). If the whole region goes down, we fallback to
         | another. We certainly don't have the time to discuss individual
         | servers or rack and stack anything.
         | 
         | It does not come cheap. AWS specifically has egregious
         | networking fees and you end up paying multiple times (AZ to AZ
         | traffic, NAT gateways, and a myriad services that also charge
         | by GB, like GuardDuty). It adds up if you are not careful.
         | 
         | From time to time, management comes with the idea of migrating
         | to 'on-prem', because that's reportedly cheaper. Sure, ignoring
         | the hundreds of engineers that will be involved in this
         | migration, and also ignoring all the engineers that will be
         | required to maintain this on-premises, it might be cheaper.
         | 
         | But that's also ignoring the main reason why cloud deployments
         | tend to become so expensive: they are easy. Confronted with the
         | option of spinning up more machines versus possibly missing a
         | deadline, middle managers will ask for more resources. Maybe
         | it's "just" 1k a month extra (those developers would cost
         | more!). It gets approved. 50 other groups are doing the same.
         | Now it's 50k. Rinse, repeat. If more emphasis would be placed
         | into optimization, most cloud deployments could be shrunk
         | spectacularly. The microservices fad doesn't help(your
         | architecture might require that, but often the reason it does
         | is because you want to ship your org chart, not for technical
         | reasons).
        
           | esperent wrote:
           | > When one buys a house, they should take a hard loo at
           | whether the default approach of paying for utilities makes
           | sense, versus generating their own power.
           | 
           | Yes, people do. They install solar panels and use them to
           | generate at least some of their own power. Near future
           | battery tech might allow them to generate all of it if they
           | get enough sunlight, in which case this will become a genuine
           | question to answer: how much to install and maintain the
           | panels and batteries over their lifetime, vs expected cost of
           | purchasing power from utilities.
           | 
           | In a similar manner, cloud vs self hosting is a valid
           | consideration that changes over time. We now have docker and
           | similar tools which make managing your own infrastructure
           | much easier than it was ten years ago. I fully expect even
           | better tools will come out in the future so this
           | consideration does change over time. Maybe in another ten
           | years there'll be almost no benefit to using the cloud
           | (except maybe as a CDN).
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | camhart wrote:
         | All in podcast mentioned growth slowing, but not revenue
         | dropping.
        
         | lolinder wrote:
         | As others have mentioned, there was no revenue drop, there's
         | been a reduction in growth. AWS's 20% growth rate is still very
         | respectable, more than double the 9% growth rate the company
         | had overall.
         | 
         | I would be hesitant to attribute slowed growth to a return to
         | self hosting, it's much more likely that it's caused by
         | companies dialing back their cloud growth after spending a few
         | years going ham digitizing everything during the pandemic.
        
           | DyslexicAtheist wrote:
           | parent still has a very strong point considering that a drop
           | in growth (not revenue) quickly translates in projects /
           | features being cancelled. That's a good thing to FailFast
           | from a start-up pov but when me as a start-up needs to make a
           | bet about building on top of certain features this adds to my
           | cost/benefit calculation when deciding if I want to jump on
           | new features (device-shadows, digital-twins, or whatever else
           | is the latest innovation the cloud announces).
           | 
           | From that pov I expect my platform to behave like a utility
           | (never change or only change with strict backward
           | compatibility). That level of control simply is against the
           | business model of the cloud.
        
             | lolinder wrote:
             | But there are so many degrees of ratcheting back cloud
             | costs before we get back to self-hosted.
             | 
             | Sure, companies are probably less interested in wacky new
             | cloud features then they were before, but that means going
             | back to basics like EC2 and RDS, which _do_ function like
             | utilities, not going back to their own data centers.
        
           | kkielhofner wrote:
           | Ah yes, sorry, slower than expected growth was the data
           | point. In my defense I had a screaming toddler in the car!
           | 
           | That said I think the point generally remains - one could
           | argue slower than expected growth in cloud services is a
           | revenue drop (in a way) vs expectations. The market responded
           | accordingly[0] - "However, Azure growth is decelerating."
           | Note that this is all including the explosion in "2023 AI
           | hotness" which is almost certainly offsetting what would be
           | larger losses due to the shift I'm arguing. As the All In
           | Guys noted "you won't see a pitch deck without the letters AI
           | in it" - and a good chunk of that is still going to cloud
           | providers as (in my opinion) there are long tails to these
           | changes and many existing solutions/applications getting "AI"
           | slapped on them are effectively trapped in $BIGCLOUD.
           | 
           | Self-hosting AI is also significantly more difficult and
           | upfront more expensive when you start looking at dealing with
           | (typically) Nvidia hardware costs and software stack
           | complexity. I can definitely see many of these "pivots" to
           | "something AI, we need to throw AI in this" the more well
           | understood and initially faster and "cheaper" utilization of
           | cloud services will continue until the AI trend stabilizes.
           | 
           | From what I could hear (and process) over the screaming the
           | All In Guys presented the argument I tend to agree with - a
           | resurgence of self-hosted infrastructure.
           | 
           | Companies are also dialing back cloud spend because they're
           | realizing for many applications it's very expensive
           | relatively and can actually be limiting compared to self-
           | hosting[1]. Per usual when the cheap money and economic boom
           | retracts they start actually looking at costs they were once
           | happy to just keep writing checks for.
           | 
           | I'd like to reiterate there's a lot of calculation and
           | strategy when it comes down to selecting infrastructure
           | hosting. Again, I think we're in a period where there's a bit
           | of a sea change/wakeup from the past decade of "of course you
           | always build and host everything in $BIGCLOUD" - without even
           | remotely considering alternatives. It's been the default for
           | a while and it isn't as much anymore - and I'd argue that
           | trend is accelerating. There is no "one size fits all".
           | 
           | [0] - https://www.investors.com/news/technology/msft-stock-
           | microso...
           | 
           | [1] - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/snapchat-earnings-case-
           | runawa...
        
             | GreedClarifies wrote:
             | In isolated cases companies can reduce costs by self
             | hosting. Usually this is a combination of very specialized
             | requirements or shockingly technically competent early
             | employees or founders.
             | 
             | However even in these exceptional cases there are hidden
             | costs that will likely arise.
             | 
             | For most companies the very concept of self hosting is
             | comical. This is a one way train.
        
             | lolinder wrote:
             | I think you're still jumping to conclusions to think that
             | the ratcheting back is going to take any significant
             | portion of the market all the way back to self-hosted. I
             | suspect that companies are less willing to invest in fancy
             | new platform features that drive more revenue than VPSs and
             | managed DBs, but I have a very hard time believing that EC2
             | or RDS are flagging.
        
       | fastest963 wrote:
       | This affected us starting at 4:57am US/Pacific with a significant
       | drop in traffic through the HTTPS Global Load Balancer across all
       | regions and Pub/Sub 502 errors but there was nothing on the
       | status page for another 45 minutes. Things returned to normal by
       | 5:05am from what I can tell.
        
         | dixie_land wrote:
         | Yup we saw the exact same symptoms with some GCLBs getting 100%
         | 502 ( our upstream QPS graph looks scary with 5 mins of 0 QPS )
        
       | monero-xmr wrote:
       | This is why any criticism of AWS reliability is meaningless to
       | me. All the cloud providers go down - all of them. Either you are
       | multi-cloud, or you run your own hardware, but these events are
       | inevitable.
        
         | vhiremath4 wrote:
         | The amount of time you are down vs. up dictates your SLOs and
         | SLAs. Criticism of how reliable one vs. another is is not only
         | valid, it's backed by hundreds of millions of contractual
         | dollars and credits every year. We spend tens of millions on
         | AWS per year. We have several SLAs with them. Our Elasticache
         | SLA was breached once (localized to us - not whole customer
         | base) and we got credits which were commensurate with the
         | amount of business we lost during that downtime period.
         | 
         | If one provider is down more than the others, the criticism is
         | not only valid, it results in real business loss for the
         | provider and its customers.
         | 
         | On multi-cloud: it's one way to reduce the amount of downtime
         | you have, but it comes with a significant operational cost
         | depending on how your application is architected and how your
         | teams internal to your company are formed. It is totally
         | practical for someone to bank on AWS' reliability until they're
         | at a significant amount of traction or revenue where the added
         | uptime of going multicloud is worth the investment. I know
         | you're not saying this isn't the case (I think you're saying
         | "do that if you're going to complain about 1 providers'
         | uptime"), but thought it was worth putting the context into the
         | HN ether.
        
           | dehrmann wrote:
           | You definitely need to look at your SLA with your customers,
           | but in my experience, multi-cloud isn't worth it. It's easier
           | to be slightly less reliable, and throw your top-three cloud
           | provider under the bus in the public post mortem. You'll
           | probably cause bigger outages on your own in between provider
           | outages, and multi-cloud adds another layer of complexity for
           | things to go wrong.
           | 
           | Multi-cloud is saying you think you can manage Kafka across
           | two or three clouds better than GCP can manage Pub/Sub.
        
         | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
         | This is why any criticism of AWS > reliability is meaningless
         | to me.
         | 
         | Er, we absolutely can and should compare rates of problems and
         | overall reliability.
        
         | dymk wrote:
         | Inevitable != immune to criticism
        
         | ctvo wrote:
         | > This is why any criticism of AWS reliability is meaningless
         | to me.
         | 
         | Is anyone tracking reliability for these public providers?
         | Would be curious how AWS compares to Azure and GCP. My
         | experience is it's better, but we may have avoided Kinesis or
         | whatever that keeps going down.
        
           | WaxProlix wrote:
           | There's Cloudharmony, https://cloudharmony.com/status
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | > _Either you are multi-cloud, or you run your own hardware_
         | 
         | If you run your own hardware these events are inevitable too.
        
           | elsonrodriguez wrote:
           | I've seen skepticism about GCP and AWS availability from
           | people with a single 2U in a closet somewhere.
           | 
           | I know it's just a psychological thing about giving up
           | "control", but I have to stifle a chuckle every time.
        
             | aflag wrote:
             | I've worked in companies that had everything on prem and
             | cloud companies. There are many nice things about cloud,
             | but reliability is not one of them. Everything is a lot
             | simpler on prem and fails a lot less in my experience. The
             | downside being that scaling is harder. And it can be more
             | expensive, depending on your size.
        
             | zamnos wrote:
             | Right? I can pay extra to have two ISPs for upstream
             | connection, but I have no idea how I'd get a second,
             | totally redundant power connection to the closet in my
             | basement. A UPS with a battery's only going to last so
             | long, so is generator fuel.
        
             | jrumbut wrote:
             | One aspect of that is the box in the closet is (in my
             | experience anyway) either up or down. It fails more often,
             | but it fails simpler.
             | 
             | In the cloud, even very small scale apps can run into weird
             | situations like the app server is up, the database is down,
             | and the cache is responding about 50% of the time.
             | 
             | If you don't account for that from the beginning, it can
             | lead to your app displaying some bizarre stuff to users.
             | 
             | I haven't run a server locally in 13 years but I can see
             | why some people would miss it.
        
         | MuffinFlavored wrote:
         | > you run your own hardware
         | 
         | in multiple datacenters?
        
       | Aldipower wrote:
       | Certainly a problem with a BGP misconfiguration. :)
        
         | zamnos wrote:
         | Nope. A BGP misconfiguration would manifest in more
         | broad/different ways.
        
       | 0x0000000 wrote:
       | Outages at the hyperscalers can have a huge blast radius, is
       | anyone encountering other services with outages because they're
       | built on GCP?
        
         | hellcow wrote:
         | We are in us-central1 and didn't have an outage, so it appears
         | not to have affected everyone.
        
       | pictur wrote:
       | they can hire new people in the coming months to avoid these
       | cuts. then they can fire them. perfect loop
        
         | andsoitis wrote:
         | Solving this sort of thing is not about throwing more people at
         | it. That would be brute force and not strategic. Instead, you
         | want to architect systems like these in a way that strikes a
         | good balance between resilience and things like
         | cost/efficiency/etc.
        
           | zamnos wrote:
           | Sure, but laying off a number of good SREs from the Internet
           | traffic team that is responsible for the Google Load Balancer
           | team can't be helping this situation.
        
             | andsoitis wrote:
             | How many such people were laid off and what were their
             | unique expertise?
        
       | bushbaba wrote:
       | This demonstrates yet again why global configurations, global
       | services, and global anycast VIP routing should be considered an
       | anti pattern.
       | 
       | gcp should be designed in a way where the term "global outage"
       | isn't a word in their vocabulary.
        
         | kevinventullo wrote:
         | _gcp should be designed in a way where the term "global outage"
         | isn't a word in their vocabulary._
         | 
         | I reckon the only to achieve that would be to have the same
         | level of interoperability between regions as you would get
         | between two distinct cloud providers.
        
         | dotancohen wrote:
         | > gcp should be designed in a way where the term "global
         | outage" isn't a word in their vocabulary.
         | 
         | If that's what you really need, then distribute your assets
         | across GCP, AWS, and DO. That likely means not using any cloud-
         | specific features such as Lambda. AWS is actually really good
         | in this regard, as SES and RDS are easily copied to regular
         | instances in other cloud providers, that possibly wrap some
         | cloud-specific feature themselves.
        
         | uniformlyrandom wrote:
         | From the messaging, this seems like a partial network outage.
         | 
         | Of course, at Google scale 'partial' is still very big.
        
         | zamnos wrote:
         | The underlying problem is that Google doesn't operate the
         | world's DNS servers, but still wants to offer the best possible
         | user experience as a global service. This means anycast VIP
         | routing, because not all DNS servers implement EDNS, but they
         | want to have SSL connections terminate as closely to users as
         | possible.
         | 
         | As far as global services go though, it's easy enough to say
         | "it should just not be possible", but how do you propose doing
         | that in practice for a global service?
         | 
         | How does new config going to go out, globally, without being
         | global? How do global services work if they're not global? How
         | does DDoS protection work if you don't do it globally?
         | 
         | People make fun of "webscale" but operating Google is really
         | difficult and complicated!
        
           | otterley wrote:
           | https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/automating-safe-
           | hand...
        
             | zamnos wrote:
             | AWS US east 1 had significant downtime last year so I'm not
             | sure what you're trying to say with that link. Would you
             | mind expanding on your thoughts?
        
               | shepherdjerred wrote:
               | One region failing (especially us-east-1) is common, but
               | it's very rare to see an AWS global outage.
        
         | consumer451 wrote:
         | My knowledge level: can use AWS console to do < 5% of what is
         | possible.
         | 
         | How much more work would Google create for themselves if they
         | had not globalized their stack? Are we talking something like 5
         | subsets to manage instead of 1?
        
           | singron wrote:
           | Most of it is cellular or regional, but there are a few
           | critical global services. The global network load balancing,
           | network qos, and ddos prevention are more functional because
           | they are global (i.e. you couldn't replace them with
           | equivalent regional versions), but are often causes of issues
           | like this. There was a push a few years ago to ensure global
           | services had at least 99.999% uptime or make them regional.
           | This was a 48 minute outage, so it blows that five 9 budget
           | for 9 years.
           | 
           | Ex-googler, no particular knowledge of this event,
           | information might be out of date.
        
             | pclmulqdq wrote:
             | The pattern for past large google outages has been:
             | 
             | 1. Some networking-related service has global, non-standard
             | (compared to the rest of the company) configuration
             | 
             | 2. The relevant VP is aware and has decided not to change
             | it because that change is quoted as impossible
             | 
             | 3. Some change elsewhere happens that assumes standard
             | configuration
             | 
             | 4. The networking service breaks and causes a global outage
             | 
             | 5. VP is told to fix it
             | 
             | 6. Fix rolls out in weeks, because it wasn't as hard as
             | they said before
        
               | richthegeek wrote:
               | Often "impossible" is based on constraints like "0
               | downtime" "100% planned rollout, rollback scenarios" etc.
               | 
               | These constraints get thrown to the wind when the
               | downtime is already happening.
        
               | pclmulqdq wrote:
               | I was being a bit hyperbolic, but this is the real
               | reason. However, the VPs in question often have the
               | authority to approve changes that don't have rollback
               | scenarios (for example), they just don't until the shit
               | hits the fan.
        
           | NineStarPoint wrote:
           | Assuming good automation, most of the work comes in being
           | able to do a second of something instead of just having one.
           | The difference in work between "single point" and "multiple
           | point" is a lot, but increasing the multiple points beyond
           | that isn't too bad.
           | 
           | Of course, if you deploy a change to all of your separated
           | stacks at once through some sort of automated pipeline it
           | doesn't matter too much. Easy to break everything
           | simultaneously that way if there's some difference between
           | test and prod you didn't realize was there.
        
           | jjoonathan wrote:
           | My biggest AWS surprise bill (so far!) was due to a bug in
           | AWS console region switching.
        
           | zamnos wrote:
           | If you get into the nitty gritty of it, it doesn't really
           | make sense. Are you going to have 5 different load balancer
           | software stacks, with 5 different config file languages,
           | causing each client (say Gmail) to have to implement their
           | config 5 different ways? That's insane.
        
         | medler wrote:
         | > gcp should be designed in a way where the term "global
         | outage" isn't a word in their vocabulary.
         | 
         | As I understand it, GCP is already designed to make global
         | outages impossible. Obviously this outage shows that they
         | messed up somehow and some global point of failure still
         | remains. Looking forward to the post-mortem.
        
           | dilyevsky wrote:
           | They had _many many_ global outages through the years so
           | that's evidently not true. GCLB, iam, gcs and probably more
           | Im missing just of the top of my head. Then there's constant
           | stream of regional networking borks where your latency is
           | suddenly 5x which are not "global" but affect multiple
           | regions
        
             | throitallaway wrote:
             | Anecdata, but in my experience Google Cloud has been MUCH
             | more solid than my time spent on AWS.
        
               | AlecSchueler wrote:
               | While a fair point it's in no way a counter argument to
               | what the person above was saying. Having fewer outages is
               | not the same as having no global outages.
        
               | dilyevsky wrote:
               | Historically that has not been my experience at all tho
               | tbf gcp has cleaned up their act substantially in the
               | past 1-2 years
        
             | medler wrote:
             | They had lots of global outages in past years, but in
             | recent years they have become increasingly rare, presumably
             | because of a move away from global points of failure
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | For reference / comparison, how many regional outages have
         | there been? Did service outages get avoided due to running a
         | workload in multiple regions?
        
         | Terretta wrote:
         | > _This demonstrates yet again why global configurations,
         | global services, and global anycast VIP routing should be
         | considered an anti pattern._
         | 
         | And why enterprises clamoring for AWS to feature match Google's
         | global stuff (theoretically making I.T. easier) instead of
         | remaining regionally isolated (making I.T. actually more
         | resilient, without extra work if I.T. operators can figure out
         | infra-as-code patterns) should STFU and learn themselves some
         | Terraform, Pulumi, or etc.
         | 
         | Also, AWS, if you're in this thread, stop with the recent
         | cross-region coupling features already. Google's doing it
         | wrong, explain that, and be patient, the market share will come
         | back to you when they run out of the GCP subsidy dollars.
        
           | verdverm wrote:
           | You really want to go through every region to find what VMs
           | are running? Why can this not be a single page with all VMs
           | listed?
        
             | shitlord wrote:
             | The AWS console already has a single page where you can see
             | how many EC2/networking resources you have in every region.
        
         | dekhn wrote:
         | there are three things that scare google engineers enough to
         | keep them up at night: a global network outage, a global power
         | outage, and a global chubby outage. Actually, they only really
         | worry about that last one.
        
         | tgtweak wrote:
         | You can't really have 30+ fully independent regions running
         | their own stack with different versions of apps and separate
         | secrets, IP/routing and certificates in each. At some point you
         | have to unify or it becomes either unmanageable or
         | inconsistent.
        
           | skywhopper wrote:
           | Most of GCP's customers can't, but independent regions are
           | one of the benefits that a well architected cloud provider
           | can give you to build on.
        
           | xwolfi wrote:
           | But you can have 3. Why did you choose 30?
           | 
           | In my company we are split in 3, US, EU, APAC, and we have
           | the same issue with global outage for stuff we could have
           | just managed regionally. For all the savings of the global
           | architecture, they disappear each minute a client is down on
           | a global outage because a guy thousands of kms away messed
           | up.
           | 
           | You dont have to unify, at all. You dont unify with your
           | competitors, and the world has not exploded: compete
           | internally between regions ?
        
             | shepherdjerred wrote:
             | GCP needs to support 30 regions because... they're a cloud
             | provider.
        
           | dastbe wrote:
           | do you mean the cloud provider can't, or the customer can't?
        
           | esperent wrote:
           | How does this fit in with upcoming EU data sovereignty laws?
        
           | encryptluks2 wrote:
           | [dead]
        
           | markstos wrote:
           | Right. You want regions to be fully independent, yet the
           | software stacks they are running to be fully synchronized and
           | consistent. So there's a tension. If there's a sleeper bug
           | that wakes only after it has been rolled out to every region,
           | you've got a global outage. Given the increasing complexity
           | of these systems, it will always be possible to find all
           | those.
        
         | papruapap wrote:
         | Because copypasting from A to B is much safer...
        
       | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
       | I fantasize that it's a three-letter agency with a warrant making
       | them either start shitting their chat logs or pulling drives and
       | recovering them the hard way.
       | 
       | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/us-says-google-r...
        
         | JosephRedfern wrote:
         | Sounds painful.
        
       | m00dy wrote:
       | Our workloads are fully functional, DK/EU
        
       | Dave3of5 wrote:
       | Ouch some pain at google today then. I hate to wake up on a
       | Monday morning to this.
       | 
       | <3 To the engineers trying to fix it at the moment.
        
         | zamnos wrote:
         | Google has follows-the-sun on-call rotations for large
         | rotations, so this hit the UK team just after lunch.
        
           | bongobingo1 wrote:
           | Ah so the rotation rotates to match the current rotation.
           | Very smart.
        
             | Leszek wrote:
             | I like the mental image of this being a very precise
             | matching -- as the sun traces across the sky, the
             | responsibility of on-call passes from desk to desk, town to
             | town, country to country; two engineers on a boat in the
             | Atlantic race to keep up with their rotation...
        
             | LewisVerstappen wrote:
             | The sun never sets on the Google empire
        
       | lee101 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | oars wrote:
       | Is it likely this outage still would've have occurred even
       | without their 12,000 layoffs in January?
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | abc20230215 wrote:
       | I hope the problem is similar to whiteboard binary tree
       | inversion.
        
       | [deleted]
        
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