37 ms·
Yes, Google plans extensively and runs regular drills. It's hearsay, but I was once told that achieving "black start" capability was a program that took many y
by jacques_chester 6y ago
Yes, Google plans extensively and runs regular drills.
It's hearsay, but I was once told that achieving "black start" capability was a program that took many years and about a billion dollars. But they (probably) have it now.
- blntechie 6y agoSo 'black start' is a program to start over from scratch? The scale required for it itself would be amazing.
- jcranmer 6y ago"Black start" is a term that refers to bringing up services when literally everything is down. It's most often referred to in the electricity sector, where bringing power up after a major regional blackout (think 2003 NE blackout) is extremely nontrivial, since the normal steps to turn on a power plant usually requires power: for example, operating valves in a hydro plant or blowers in a coal/gas/oil plant, synchronizing your generation with grid frequency, having something to consume the power; even operating the relays and circuit breakers to connect to the grid may require grid power. The idea here is presumably that Google services have so many mutual dependencies that if everything were to go down, restarting would be nontrivial because every service would be blocked on starting up due to some other service not being available.
- twistedpair 6y ago"black start" for GCP would be something to see. Since the global root keys for Cloud KMS are kept on physical encrypted keys locked safes, accessible to only a few core personnel, that would be interesting, akin to a missile silo launch.
- jacques_chester 6y agoIt would be amazing to see. But I hope we never have to.