5 ms·

The worst part has been the poor communication. If they were to give clearer insight from the get go, that'd give me more confidence and patience. Saying "check

The worst part has been the poor communication. If they were to give clearer insight from the get go, that'd give me more confidence and patience. Saying "check back in 2 hours" isn't useful.

mrep 8y ago
> Saying "check back in 2 hours" isn't useful. Having worked for a cloud provider, the reason they are saying that is because they are actively working to understand and fix the problem but haven't come to a well resound solution and thus they cannot give you a decent time estimate because you will probably get even more mad if they under/over estimate the time it took to fix it.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Exactly, this happens even in just a normal production failure. I don't know what else they could have said/communicated. Not to mention this is the 7th largest data center in the world, resolving the problem likely took/is taking a long long time just because there are so many machines. I was lucky that the only outage effect I've suffered from is that my storage is locked, which means I can't add new file/edit code in production...but that's much better than it being down completely. My databases are geo-redundant, so that was a blessing today.
  - dmarlow 8y ago
    Were you able to perform operations given ARM services were down? Were you using your secondary DB for read-only or did you fail-over some other way?
    - distortedsignal 8y ago
      How often do we do this for our customers? Honestly, if a customer wanted to know that much detail about my process, I would be quite bothered, and I suspect most people would be as well. Wait for the recap, everything will become clear then. You don't need to know everything in the moment.
      - dmarlow 8y ago
        I'm not asking for every detail. It's horrible to wait 20 hours and counting for unknown reasons and to not have something to work towards. I only ask for more transparency is all. It's akin to waiting for surgery and the doctor saying "we're working on it". I don't want/need the details for the surgery, but tell me everything is ok, what comes next and give me some estimates to set expectations.
- dmarlow 8y ago
  If they said this, "because they are actively working to understand and fix the problem but haven't come to a well resound solution and thus they cannot give you a decent time estimate because you will probably get even more mad if they under/over estimate the time it took to fix it." I would thank and applaud them. Tell me what it is you're doing at least. Why don't you understand the problem? What are you investigating? Some transparency goes a long way for me.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    I used to think like this too - e.g. I was happy when our national rail started announcing the cause of delays. But then a friend of mine was complaining that they did this, because he didn't want to be troubled with their internal problems - "just tell me what to do". When your customer's demands are so directly opposed, you're somewhat caught between a rock and a hard place.
    - madmulita 8y ago
      You can easily reflect both positions in your status page. Those who don't need to be bothered with the details can refrain from reading them.
      - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
        I really don't understand why everything has to be black or white with any of this stuff. All this would take to keep both sides happy is a little link with "more info" below it. Why things like this are so difficult, I will never understand.
      - Vinnl 8y ago
        Hmm yeah, I guess in this case that is true. Probably a matter of not having been in this situation often and thus not designed the status page that extensively.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

The worst part has been the poor communication. If they were to give clearer insight from the get go, that'd give me more confidence and patience. Saying "check back in 2 hours" isn't useful.

mrep 8y ago

> Saying "check back in 2 hours" isn't useful. Having worked for a cloud provider, the reason they are saying that is because they are actively working to understand and fix the problem but haven't come to a well resound solution and thus they cannot give you a decent time estimate because you will probably get even more mad if they under/over estimate the time it took to fix it.

partiallypro 8y ago
Exactly, this happens even in just a normal production failure. I don't know what else they could have said/communicated. Not to mention this is the 7th largest data center in the world, resolving the problem likely took/is taking a long long time just because there are so many machines. I was lucky that the only outage effect I've suffered from is that my storage is locked, which means I can't add new file/edit code in production...but that's much better than it being down completely. My databases are geo-redundant, so that was a blessing today.
- dmarlow 8y ago
  Were you able to perform operations given ARM services were down? Were you using your secondary DB for read-only or did you fail-over some other way?
  - distortedsignal 8y ago
    How often do we do this for our customers? Honestly, if a customer wanted to know that much detail about my process, I would be quite bothered, and I suspect most people would be as well. Wait for the recap, everything will become clear then. You don't need to know everything in the moment.
    - dmarlow 8y ago
      I'm not asking for every detail. It's horrible to wait 20 hours and counting for unknown reasons and to not have something to work towards. I only ask for more transparency is all. It's akin to waiting for surgery and the doctor saying "we're working on it". I don't want/need the details for the surgery, but tell me everything is ok, what comes next and give me some estimates to set expectations.
dmarlow 8y ago
If they said this, "because they are actively working to understand and fix the problem but haven't come to a well resound solution and thus they cannot give you a decent time estimate because you will probably get even more mad if they under/over estimate the time it took to fix it." I would thank and applaud them. Tell me what it is you're doing at least. Why don't you understand the problem? What are you investigating? Some transparency goes a long way for me.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  I used to think like this too - e.g. I was happy when our national rail started announcing the cause of delays. But then a friend of mine was complaining that they did this, because he didn't want to be troubled with their internal problems - "just tell me what to do". When your customer's demands are so directly opposed, you're somewhat caught between a rock and a hard place.
  - madmulita 8y ago
    You can easily reflect both positions in your status page. Those who don't need to be bothered with the details can refrain from reading them.
    - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
      I really don't understand why everything has to be black or white with any of this stuff. All this would take to keep both sides happy is a little link with "more info" below it. Why things like this are so difficult, I will never understand.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      Hmm yeah, I guess in this case that is true. Probably a matter of not having been in this situation often and thus not designed the status page that extensively.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]