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Google Cloud Is Having IO Issues in US-EAST1
- teovall 7y agoThis outage is affecting Discord. https://status.discordapp.com/ https://status.discordapp.com/
- bpye 7y agoDiscord seems to be preventing new connections.
- soup10 7y ago...
- RugnirViking 7y agoAnd why would that be? Are they a particular problem customer for google?
- soup10 7y ago...
- kzrdude 7y agoand discord's 3rd party client policy is not doing them any favours
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoAnnoyed at being on call: How dare they do their expected responsibilities in exchange for pay. The nerve of them.
- p1necone 7y agoIt's very possible they're not "officially" on call and don't get any extra pay for having to work in the weekend. Just because that's the current expectation of a lot of salaried workers doesn't mean it's right.
- npo9 7y agoDiscord has millions of users. Less than 1000 people are probably bothered at Google to fix the problem. My sympathies lie with Discord users. I’m sure it’s ruining a lot more weekend plans with them. I’ve both a discord user and someone that has spent years in an on-call rotation that included nights and weekends.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ecf 7y ago<> [Removed reply since the comment I was replying to was removed.]
- npo9 7y agoThis type of outage happens with all of the cloud providers from time to time.
- scarface74 7y agoYes. Technically it happens to all companies but politically it’s a lot different. If you tell your customers that you have an outage because AWS is down, they will shrug and say, things happen. You are in the same boat with a lot of other people, you will no more get blamed for AWS being down than if the whole city lost power. No one ever got fired for choosing AWS. If you’re on Azure, you might get a funny look from people who only know about AWS, but since it is Microsoft Azure you will get a pass. But people will judge you for choosing GCP. Any little thing that goes wrong, they will be questioning why you didn’t choose AWS.
- xerox13ster 7y agoNot gonna lie, one of the first things I said to my friends is why is discord using Google, it should be AWS.
- Fellshard 7y agoThe categories of errors - and Google's ability to recognize and respond to those errors in rapid form - has always seemed extraordinarily slow and reticent compared to AWS. It's one of the concerns I'd have when recommending it.
- VolatileVoid 7y agoIs it just me or are Discord's status updates legendarily bad to the point of being entirely useless? As a user of the discord app, don't tell me the "API is having issues." Just tell me, "Discord is currently down. We are working on it and apologise for the disruption." Everything else is unnecessary line noise.
- p1necone 7y agoMentioning the cause of the issue seems better than just "shits broke yo" to me.
- VolatileVoid 7y agoReally? What in their status update read to you as "the problem is on our side, not yours"? Understand that I'm a programmer and couldn't figure that out.
- Fabricio20 7y agoThe Discordapp status page is written to by developers, and as a developer I really like the insights as to what is going on. As a user, I expect you to just look at it and see it's "Having Issues, We are working on it".
- scottmf 7y agoWe use Discord as an interface for moderating our app and monitoring spam/reported content so this kinda sucks. Not super important though.
- seriesf 7y agoBeing taken down by slow IO in a single cloud zone seems to implicated their overall architecture.
- jrockway 7y agoLooking at their job postings, they use Cassandra and Elasticsearch, so I am somewhat surprised that they didn't survive this outage. (I have not ever run Cassandra at scale, but their website says in the first paragraph that it's designed to handle regional failures.) If I were on GCP and had paying customers, I would use Cloud Spanner. It's expensive, but it's a good piece of technology.
- sieabahlpark 7y agoMost startup companies worry about building out features than building out reliable infrastructure. Almost always an after thought
- seriesf 7y agoThe gift of Spanner is it’s always slow, so if you start there you will naturally gain experience in either hiding latency or relaxing consistency requirements, which are both good skills.
- vl 7y agoSpanner is pretty fast, but as with any database you have to use it correctly to get the speed. Since it’s a non-standard database, it requires non-standard tricks and skills.
- jrockway 7y agoNo, that's about right. You get one write per second per entity or something like that and that's as fast as it goes. The key is to choose your entity wiseley. I wrote an app inside Google that did on the order of 10,000 writes per second and it was no problem; each entity group only showed up once every minute or so.
- mostlystatic 7y agoCloud SQL has been down for me for 45 minutes now. The status page still doesn't say, but it says this in the Known Issues for technical support: "We are experiencing an issue with Cloud SQL instances hosted in the us-east1 region, beginning at Saturday, 2019-12-07 10:00 US/Pacific. Symptoms: Some Cloud SQL instances hosted in this region are becoming unavailable, and are refusing connections. Self-diagnosis: Connections to the Cloud SQL instance are rejected. Workaround: None at this time Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue. We will provide an update by Saturday, 2019-12-07 12:04 US/Pacific with current details."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Illniyar 7y agoWell here goes the 4 nines.
- microcolonel 7y agoNo worries, that's what the other datacenters are for. :- )
- Jasper_ 7y agoThe beauty of distributed systems is that you spread your services across lots of different computers, so that when one of them goes down, they all go down.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago“A distributed system is the one that prevents you from working because of the failure of a machine that you had never heard of.”
- itronitron 7y agoand typically that machine is the authentication server
- Terretta 7y agoJoking aside, more typically the server you never heard of will be something in the CSP’s control plane. But that’s just a distraction. We hear about those outages once in a blue moon, because many rely on them. What we don’t hear about is that any given colo, managed service, or CSP customer’s apps go down on their own, all the time, not because of the colo or CSP. Such outages are banal, so we forget how much more likely they are, and fail to risk-weight our engineering efforts accordingly.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoIt's not really distributed if there's a single point of failure?
- erik_seaberg 7y agoRedundancy isn't the only reason to make a system distributed. There's also latency, cost to scale, and federated management. DNS is very distributed but redundancy is opt-in. Many distributed systems try to be reliable by retrying failed nodes' work, but designs aren't always sound.
- 7y ago
- exabrial 7y agoInteresting, do they use a SAN or is it local storage?
- tyingq 7y agoThey offer both: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/ Discord's description of the issue sounds like issues with either zonal or regional SAN storage.
- ithkuil 7y agoGoogle Cloud Persistent Disks are implemented on a kind of Storage Area Network (AFAIK it's based on IP networking, IIRC it's iSCSI over Colossus /D, not on fiberchannel or other off the shelf SAN tech)
- joatmon-snoo 7y agoIt's not iSCSI (at least I don't think so). The closest thing to public literature about Colossus and D that we've ever published is the Procella paper, which describes the abstractions that Colossus provides for it. In some ways it's similar to GFS (RPC interface, writes are generally append/overwrite) but many things are completely different now.
- ithkuil 7y agoYeah, that's what Colossus is, but t it's not (was not?) suitable to directly implement a block store such as a (remote) disk. You need something that provides the block store abstraction on top of the primitives exposed by Colossus/D. Think of something like what modern SSD do in order to work efficiently with the underlying flash memory. Then you have to hook that adapter in your virtualization stack (e.g. kvm) so you can boot from the volume and mount it from inside the VM. You could implement a kernel module or do it internally in kvm/qemu somehow, but iSCSI provides a straight-forward way to implement this in user-space: you have a process on your physical machine that speaks iSCSI upstream, and speaks Colossus/D RPC downstream. (I don't know if they still do this but I have a vague memory of somebody describing the stack of an early version of GCP while I was working there long time ago)
- Animats 7y agoIs this the beginning of Google's wind-down of "cloud services", as part of the de-emphasis of Alphabet and the refocus on the core ad business?
- ilogik 7y agoyes, they're moving out of a profitable business where they have a lot of knowledge about. and they start this move with an outage during the busiest time of the year why not?
- leesalminen 7y ago> yes, they're moving out of a profitable business where they have a lot of knowledge about. Rackspace is trying to get out of the public cloud game. We had $20k/mo account with them and the rep called me every month asking if we wanted their help (professional services) migrating to AWS. I was baffled but they admitted they don’t want to be in the Cloud game anymore and wanted to get customers off their platform.
- pm90 7y agoThe reason they’re moving out is because the cloud business is not profitable for Rackspace.
- kick 7y agoThe notification on their website is interesting: Rackspace announced that it has completed the acquisition of Onica, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider.
- goosehonk 7y agoThe ratio of stupid:reputation in this comment is pretty remarkable.
- heybrendan 7y agoRespectfully Mr. Nagle, I expect more intelligent {commentary,questioning} from you, especially given your breadth of experience and background. A mere infrastructure issue, that occurs with all providers from time to time, would hardly constitute a service "wind-down". Based on a very cursory review, GCP's official deprecation policy [1] doesn't seem all that dissimilar from everyone else. In short, to answer your question: No. [1] https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoI am in general a big fan of GCP, especially for startups. In many cases I find I can be productive faster in GCP compared to AWS, in the sense that it's easier to do "wrong" things in AWS if you don't have a top notch devops person. That said, it seems like GCP has a real, significant problem with overall reliability. While I don't have numbers to compare, seems like I see frequent outage notifications on HN for GCP. They really need to focus more on reliability than new features.
- RKearney 7y ago> I am in general a big fan of GCP, especially for startups. The major disagreement here from me on this is that GCP does not support IPv6 (outside of IPv6 termination on load balancers) and I do not agree with startups launching without IPv6 support in 2019.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoAs a network person thank you for bootstrapping IPv6 where you can. Most folks still don’t care :-(.
- eloff 7y agoI agree it's important, but it doesn't really bother me since I'll put Cloudflare and or a network load balancer in front of anything external facing anyway. Internal things being ipv4 is fine. Other benefits aside you halve your bandwidth bill by putting Cloudflare in front.
- ljhsiung 7y agoIn case you're curious, here's some logs about their status https://status.cloud.google.com/summary https://status.cloud.google.com/summary Looking at Cloud Compute, the one responsible for the outage today and I think the big one a few months ago (13 hours!!!), they still do achieve 99% uptime (having been down 81 hours total this year). While 99% uptime "sounds" great, this is paltry in comparison to AWS, which has set the standard for 99.99% (also known as "4 9s") in reliability, translating to about an hour of downtime per year. Just gives you some more perspective and concrete numbers. Perhaps one of the reasons you find GCP "faster" is due to more devotion of resources to "speed" over "reliability".
- synack 7y agoThe most recent update indicates that this outage is only affecting a single availability zone. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/gce-operations/oYoFJiQzgVk/VubkMZ-pBgAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/gce-operations/oYoFJ...