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Comparing the risk of a live update to a system lives depend on to the risk of some Google services going down is irrational. At some point, delaying the deplo

by nxzero 11y ago

Comparing the risk of a live update to a system lives depend on to the risk of some Google services going down is irrational. At some point, delaying the deployment of updates system wide would cause more, not less risks.

Gravityloss 11y ago
There are businesses that fit somewhere between Boeing and Spotify where failures still have some kind of steeper than casual cost. On Hacker News the "move fast and break things" ethos is probably making sense for many of the people submitting and commenting, since their business is closer to casual usage anyway. But that's not the whole audience.
- nxzero 11y ago
  Shit happens, when it comes to engineering, I'd trust Google more than even likely Boeing to manage systemic risk. As for cars, it's a real risk, but not the same as the bugs Google experienced; I personally have experienced a "bug" driving a car at high speeds, which resulted in a number of major electronic systems failing due to custom systems installed by a well known US startup.
  - Gravityloss 11y ago
    Depends. You design and operate for a certain "shit happens" probability and price. That's why I brought up airliners. You can't set low reliability goals and just say "shit happens". You would have less buyers, and it's not even legal anymore. So the bullet was bit and more reliable aircraft were developed. In the software world we're more like nineteen twenties still. That changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_599 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_599 Let me phrase it in a perhaps less confrontational way. I see that there could be some business value in more reliable cloud platforms. There might be some business value with more nines in the availability percent, that is, less downtime per year. Or maybe just less global outages, even if that means more cases where some of a certain customers' containers or vm:s or what you have might be unavailable some of the time. That can be handled by running multiple units in the same cloud and with other techniques. But at the moment, since there seem to be single points of failure (or policies that are single points of failure, like to update everything at once), if you, as a customer, would like to have more safety, you would have to run services in two different providers' cloud platforms. That could get slightly more complicated - and expensive as well. I guess some parts of these technologies are quite new so someone will come up with easy and good solutions.
    - nxzero 11y ago
      As it relates to airplanes, "shit happens" still applies. I was flying into NYC one time and air traffic control mistakenly allowed the plane I was on to attempt a landing while another plane was taking off; my pilot don't even notice the other plane until we were over the runway. Later found out NYC depends in a number of cases for pilots to avoid collision by literally looking out the window for traffic in their fight path. >> "I see that there could be some business value in more reliable cloud platforms." Likely, though I have no idea how much Google is making with cloud services, but Amazon I believe is making tens of billions alone with its cloud services. That said, Amazon as far as I'm able to recall has had far worse issues and appears to be doing fine as a business.

by nxzero 11y ago

Gravityloss 11y ago

There are businesses that fit somewhere between Boeing and Spotify where failures still have some kind of steeper than casual cost. On Hacker News the "move fast and break things" ethos is probably making sense for many of the people submitting and commenting, since their business is closer to casual usage anyway. But that's not the whole audience.

nxzero 11y ago
Shit happens, when it comes to engineering, I'd trust Google more than even likely Boeing to manage systemic risk. As for cars, it's a real risk, but not the same as the bugs Google experienced; I personally have experienced a "bug" driving a car at high speeds, which resulted in a number of major electronic systems failing due to custom systems installed by a well known US startup.
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  Depends. You design and operate for a certain "shit happens" probability and price. That's why I brought up airliners. You can't set low reliability goals and just say "shit happens". You would have less buyers, and it's not even legal anymore. So the bullet was bit and more reliable aircraft were developed. In the software world we're more like nineteen twenties still. That changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_599 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_599 Let me phrase it in a perhaps less confrontational way. I see that there could be some business value in more reliable cloud platforms. There might be some business value with more nines in the availability percent, that is, less downtime per year. Or maybe just less global outages, even if that means more cases where some of a certain customers' containers or vm:s or what you have might be unavailable some of the time. That can be handled by running multiple units in the same cloud and with other techniques. But at the moment, since there seem to be single points of failure (or policies that are single points of failure, like to update everything at once), if you, as a customer, would like to have more safety, you would have to run services in two different providers' cloud platforms. That could get slightly more complicated - and expensive as well. I guess some parts of these technologies are quite new so someone will come up with easy and good solutions.
  - nxzero 11y ago
    As it relates to airplanes, "shit happens" still applies. I was flying into NYC one time and air traffic control mistakenly allowed the plane I was on to attempt a landing while another plane was taking off; my pilot don't even notice the other plane until we were over the runway. Later found out NYC depends in a number of cases for pilots to avoid collision by literally looking out the window for traffic in their fight path. >> "I see that there could be some business value in more reliable cloud platforms." Likely, though I have no idea how much Google is making with cloud services, but Amazon I believe is making tens of billions alone with its cloud services. That said, Amazon as far as I'm able to recall has had far worse issues and appears to be doing fine as a business.