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Sharing details on a recent incident impacting one of our customers
- tkcranny 2y ago> ‘Google teams worked 24x7 over several days’ I don’t know if they get what the seven means there.
- ReleaseCandidat 2y agoThey worked so múch, the days felt like weeks.
- rezonant 2y agoI suppose if mitigation fell over the weekend it might still make sense.
- shermantanktop 2y ago24 engineers, 7 hours a day. Plus massages and free cafeteria food from a chef.
- Etherlord87 2y agoPerhaps the team members cycle so that the team was working on the thing without any night or weekend break. Which should be a standard thing at all times for a big project like this IMHO.
- crazygringo 2y agoHa, you're right it's a bit nonsensical if you take it completely literally. But of course x7 means working every day of the week. So you can absolutely work 24x7 from Thursday afternoon through Tuesday morning. It just means they didn't take the weekend off.
- iJohnDoe 2y agoOr they offloaded to India like they do for most of their stuff.
- shombaboor 2y agothis comment made my day
- smileson2 2y ago[dead]
- foobazgt 2y agoSounds like a pretty thorough review in that they didn't stop at just an investigation of the specific tool / process, but also examined the rest for any auto deletion problems and also confirmed soft delete behavior. They could have gone one step further by reviewing all cases of default behavior for anything that might be surprising. That said, it can be difficult to assess what is "surprising", as it's often the people who know the least about a tool/API who also utilize its defaults.
- x0x0 2y agoSounds more like some pants browning because incidents like this are a great reason to just use aws. Like come on: > After the end of the system-assigned 1 year period, the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud was deleted. No customer notification was sent because the deletion was triggered as a result of a parameter being left blank by Google operators using the internal tool, and not due a customer deletion request. Any customer-initiated deletion would have been preceded by a notification to the customer. ... Tada! We're so incompetent we let giant deletes happen with no human review. Thank god this customer didn't trust us and kept off-gcp backups or they'd be completely screwed. > There has not been an incident of this nature within Google Cloud prior to this instance. It is not a systemic issue. Translated to English: oh god, every aws and Azure salesperson has sent 3 emails to all their prospects citing our utter fuckup.
- markfive 2y ago> Thank god this customer didn't trust us and kept off-gcp backups or they'd be completely screwed. Except that, from the article, the customer's backups that were used to recover were in GCP, and in the same region.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI'm curious about that bit. https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update https://www.unisuper.com.au/contact-us/outage-update says "UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration."
- gnabgib 2y agoRelated stories UniSuper members go a week with no account access after Google Cloud misconfig[0](186 points, 16 days ago, 42 comments) Google Cloud accidentally deletes customer's account [1](128 points, 15 days ago, 32 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40313171
- tempnow987 2y agoWow - I was wrong. I thought this would have been something like terraform with a default to immediate delete with no recovery period or something. Still a default, but a third party thing and maybe someone in unisuper testing something and mis-scoping the delete. Crazy that it really was google side. UniSuper must have been like WHAT THE HELL?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rezonant 2y agoOne assumes they are getting a massive credit to their GCP bill, if not an outright remediation payment from Google.
- beachy 2y agoThe effusive praise for the customer in Google's statement makes me think they have free GCP for the next year, in exchange for not going public with their frustrations.
- markmark 2y agoThe article describes what happened and it had nothing to do with Unisuper. Google deployed the private cloud with an internal Google tool. And that internal Google tool configured things to auto-delete after a year.
- mannyv 2y agoI guessed it was provisioning or keys. Looks like I was somewhat correct!
- janalsncm 2y agoI think it stretches credulity to say that the first time such an event happened was with a multi billion dollar mutual fund. In other words, I’m glad Unisuper’s problem was resolved, but there were probably many others which were small enough to ignore. I can only hope this gives GCP the kick in the pants it needs.
- resolutebat 2y agoGCVE (managed VMware) is a pretty obscure service, it's only used by the kind of multi billion dollar companies that want to lift and shift their legacy VMware fleets into the cloud as is.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 2y agoI doubt it, because even a smaller customer would have taken this to the press, which would have picked up on it. "Google deleted our cloud service" is a major news story for a business of any size.
- joshuamorton 2y agoA critical piece of the incident here was that this involved special customization that most customers didn't have or use, and which bypassed some safety checks, as a result it couldn't impact "normal" small customers.
- sgt101 2y agoSuper motivating to have off cloud backup strategies...
- tgv 2y agoOr cross-cloud. S3's ingress and storage costs are low, so that's an option when you don't use AWS.
- jawns 2y ago> The customer’s CIO and technical teams deserve praise for the speed and precision with which they executed the 24x7 recovery, working closely with Google Cloud teams. I wonder if they just get praise in a blog post, or if the customer is now sitting on a king's ransom in Google Cloud credit.
- noncoml 2y agoWhat surprises me the most is that the customer managed to actually speak to a person from Google support. Must have been a pretty big private cloud deployment. Edit: saw from the other replies that the customer was Unisuper. No wonder they managed to speak to an actual person.
- cebert 2y ago> “Google Cloud continues to have the most resilient and stable cloud infrastructure in the world.” I don’t think GPC has that reputation compared to AWS or Azure. They aren’t at the same level.
- bowmessage 2y ago[flagged]
- pja 2y agoGoogle Private Cloud I think.
- sa46 2y agoMicrosoft is prone to severe breaches a few times per year. https://firewalltimes.com/microsoft-data-breach-timeline/ https://firewalltimes.com/microsoft-data-breach-timeline/
- pquki4 2y agoYou can't just equate Microsoft and Azure like that.
- skywhopper 2y agoAzure has had multiple embarrassingly bad tenant-boundary leaks, including stuff like being able to access another customer’s metadata service, including credentials, just by changing a port number. They clearly have some major issues with lack of internal architecture review.
- markmark 2y agoDoes Azure? I think there's AWS then everyone else.
- pm90 2y agoI have used Azure, AWS and GCP. The only reason people use Azure is because others force them to. It’s an extremely shitty cloud product. They pretend to compete with AWS but aren’t even as good as GCP.
- snewman 2y agoGiven the level of impact that this incident caused, I am surprised that the remediations did not go deeper. They ensured that the same problem could not happen again in the same way, but that's all. So some equivalent glitch somewhere down the road could lead to a similar result (or worse; not all customers might have the same "robust and resilient architectural approach to managing risk of outage or failure"). Examples of things they could have done to systematically guard against inappropriate service termination / deletion in the future: 1. When terminating a service, temporarily place it in a state where the service is unavailable but all data is retained and can be restored at the push of a button. Discard the data after a few days. This provides an opportunity for the customer to report the problem. 2. Audit all deletion workflows for all services (they only mention having reviewed GCVE). Ensure that customers are notified in advance whenever any service is terminated, even if "the deletion was triggered as a result of a parameter being left blank by Google operators using the internal tool". 3. Add manual review for any termination of a service that is in active use, above a certain size. Absent these broader measures, I don't find this postmortem to be in the slightest bit reassuring. Given the are-you-f*ing-kidding-me nature of the incident, I would have expected any sensible provider who takes the slightest pride in their service, or even is merely interested in protecting their reputation, to visibly go over the top in ensuring nothing like this could happen again. Instead, they've done the bare minimum. That says something bad about the culture at Google Cloud.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoThat sounds reasonable. Perhaps they felt that a larger change to process would be riskier overall.
- TheCleric 2y agoNo it would probably be even worse from Google’s perspective: more expensive.
- rezonant 2y agoHard agree. They clearly were more interested in making clear that there's not a systemic problem in how GCP's operators manage the platform, which read strongly and alarmingly that there is a systemic problem in how GCP's operators manage the platform. The lack of the common sense measures you outline in their postmortem just tells me that they aren't doing anything to fix it.
- JCM9 2y agoThe quality and rigor of GCP’s engineering is not even remotely close to that of an AWS or Azure and this incident shows it.
- justinclift 2y agoAnd Azure has a very poor reputation, so that bar is not at all high.
- SoftTalker 2y agoHonestly I've never worked anywhere that didn't have some kind of "war story" that was told about how some admin or programmer mistake resulted in the deletion of some vast swathe of data, and then the panic-driven heroics that were needed to recover. It shouldn't happen, but it does, all the time, because humans aren't perfect, and neither are the things we create.
- 20after4 2y agoSure, it's the tone and content of their response that is worrying, more than the fact that an incident happened. An honest and transparent root cause analysis with technically sound and thorough mitigations, including changes in policy with regard to defaults. Their response seems like only the most superficial, bare-minimum approximation of an appropriate response to deleting a large customer's entire account. If I were on the incident response team I'd be strongly advocating for at lease these additional changes: Make deletes opt-in rather than opt out. Make all large-scale deletions have some review process with automated tests and a final human review. And not just some low-level technical employee, the account managers should have seen this on their dashboard somewhere long before it happened. Finally, undertake a thorough and systematic review of other services to look for similar failure modes, especially with regard anything which is potentially destructive and can conceivably be default-on in the absence of a supplied configuration parameter.
- kccqzy 2y agoAzure has had a continuous stream of security breaches. I don't trust them either. It's AWS and AWS alone.
- l00tr 2y agoif it would be small or medium buisness google wouldnt even care
- lopkeny12ko 2y ago> Google Cloud services have strong safeguards in place with a combination of soft delete, advance notification, and human-in-the-loop, as appropriate. I mean, clearly not? By Google's own admission, in this very article, the resources were not soft deleted, no advance notification was sent, and there was no human in the loop for approving the automated deletion. And Google's remediation items include adding even more automation for this process. This sounds totally backward to me. Am I missing something?
- jerbear4328 2y agoThey automated away the part that had a human error (the internal tool with a field left blank), so that human error can't mess it up in the same way again. They should move that human labor to checking before tons of stuff gets deleted.
- 20after4 2y agoIt seems to me that the default-delete is the real WTF. Why would a blank field result in a default auto-delete in any sane world. The delete should be opt-in not opt-out.
- macintux 2y agoIt took me way too many years to figure out that any management script I write for myself and my co-workers should, by default, execute as a dry run operation. I now put a -e/--execute flag on every destructive command; without that, the script will conduct some basic sanity checks and halt before making changes.
- maximinus_thrax 2y ago> Google Cloud continues to have the most resilient and stable cloud infrastructure in the world. As a company, Google has a lot of work to do about its customer care reputation regardless of what some metrics somewhere say about who's cloud is more reliable or not. I would not trust my business to Google Cloud, I would not trust anything with money to anything with the Google logo. Anyone who's been reading hacker news for a couple of years can remember how many times folks were asking for insider contacts to recover their accounts/data. Extrapolating this to a business would keep me up at night.
- dekhn 2y agoIf you're a GCP customer with a TAM, here's how to make them squirm. Ask them what protections GCP has in place, on your account, that would prevent GCP from inadvertently deleting large amounts of resources if GCP makes an administrative error. They'll point to something that says this specific problem was alleviated (by deprecating the tool that did it, and automating more of the process), and then you can persist: we know you've fixed this problem, then followup: will a human review this large-scale deletion before the resources are deleted? From what I can tell (I worked for GCP aeons ago, and am an active user of AWS for even longer) GCP's human-based protection measures are close to non-existent, and much less than AWS. Either way, it's definitely worth asking your TAM about this very real risk.
- RajT88 2y agoGive 'em hell. This motivates the TAM's to learn to work the system better. They will never be able to change things on their own, but sometimes you get escalation path promises and gentlemen's agreements. Enough screaming TAM's may eventually motivate someone high up to take action. Someday.
- ethbr1 2y agoWay in which TAMs usually actually fix things: - Single customer complains loudly - TAM searches for other customers with similar concerns - Once total ARR is sufficient... - It gets added to dev's roadmap
- postatic 2y agoUni super customer here in Aus. Didn’t know what it was but kept receiving emails every day when they were trying to resolve this. Only found out from news on what’s actually happened. Feels like they downplayed the whole thing as “system downtime”. Imagine something actually happened to people’s money and billions of dollars that were saved as their superannuation fund.
- badcppdev 2y agoDid you get the same emails that other people did? An email almost every day with the words "disruption", "apologies", "frustration" used multiple times. A few days in an email titled: "A letter from the CEO" > I am writing to provide you with an update on the disruption to our services. > Firstly, let me begin by personally apologising for the outage, and thank you for your patience with our teams as they work around the clock to progressively get our systems back online. I'm really not sure that you could ask for clearer communication at the time or a clearer description of what went from inside Google Cloud
- lukeschlather 2y agoThe initial statement on this incident was pretty misleading, it sounded like Google just accidentally deleted an entire GCP account. Reading this writeup I'm reassured, it sounds like they only lost a region's worth of virtual machines, which is absolutely something that happens (and that I think my systems can handle without too much trouble.) The original writeup made it sound like all of their GCS buckets, SQL databases, etc. in all regions were just gone which is a different thing and something I hope Google can be trusted not to do.
- wmf 2y agoIt was a red flag when UniSuper said their subscription was deleted, not their account. Many people jumped to conclusions about that.
- hiddencost 2y ago> It is not a systemic issue. I kinda think the opposite. The culture that kept these kinds of problems at bay has largely left the company or stopped trying to keep it alive, as they no longer really care about what they're building. Morale is real bad.
- mercurialsolo 2y agoOnly if internal tools went thru the same scrutiny as public tools. More often than not critical parameters or mis-configurations happen because of internal tools which work on unpublished params. Internal tools should be treated as tech debt. You won't be able to eliminate issues but vastly reduce the surface area of errors.
- jwnin 2y agoEnd of day Friday disclosure before a long holiday weekend; well timed.
- nurettin 2y agoIt sounds like a giant PR piece about how Google is ready to respond to a single customer and is ready to work through their problems instead of creating an auto-response account suspension infinite loop nightmare.
- kjellsbells 2y agoInteresting, but I draw different lessons from the post. Use of internal tools. Sure, everyone has internal tools, but if you are doing customer stuff, you really ought to be using the same API surface as the public tooling, which at cloud scale is guaranteed to have been exercised and tested much more than some little dev group's scripts. Was that the case here? Passive voice. This post should have a name attached to it. Like, Thomas Kurian. Palming it off to the anonymous "customer support team" still shows a lack of understanding of how trust is maintained with customers. The recovery seems to have been due to exceptional good fortune or foresight on the part of the customer, not Google. It seems that the customer had images or data stored outside of GCP. How many of us cloud users could say that? How many of us cloud users have encouraged customers to move further and deeper along the IaaS > PaaS > SaaS curve, making them more vulnerable to total account loss like this? There's an uncomfortable lesson here.
- kleton 2y ago> name attached Blameless (and nameless) postmortems are a cultural thing at google
- rohansingh 2y agoThat's great internally, but serious external communication with customers should have a name attached and responsibility accepted (i.e., "the buck stops here").
- hluska 2y agoCulture can’t just change like that.
- saurik 2y agoSo, I read your comment and realized that I think it made me misinterpret the comment you are replying to? I thereby wrote a big paragraph explaining how even as someone who cares about personal accountability within large companies, I didn't think a name made sense to assign blame here for a variety of reasons... ...but, then I realized that that isn't what is being asked for here: the comment isn't talking about the nameless "Google operators" that aren't being blamed, it is talking about the lack of anyone who wrote this post itself! There, I think I do agree: someone should sign off on a post like this, whether it is a project lead or the CEO of the entire company... it shouldn't just be "Google Cloud Customer Support". Having articles that aren't really written by anyone frankly makes it difficult for my monkey brain to feel there are actual humans on the inside whom I can trust to care about what is going on; and, FWIW, this hasn't always been a general part of Google's culture: if this had been a screw up in the search engine a decade ago, we would have gotten a statement from Matt Cutts, and knowing that there was that specific human who cared on the inside meant a lot to some of us.
- emmelaich 2y agoUsing "TL;DR" in professional communication is a little unprofessional. Some non-nerd exec is going to wonder what the heck that means.
- logrot 2y agoIt used to be called executive summary. It's brilliant but the kids found it a too formal phrase. IMHO almost every article should start with one.
- logrot 2y agoExecutive summary?
- petesergeant 2y agothere's literally a tl;dr in the linked article
- none_to_remain 2y agoThere should be an Executive Summary
- taspeotis 2y agoGoogle employee scheduled the deletion of UniSuper’s resources and Google (ironically) did not cancel it.
- xyst 2y agoTransparency for Google is releasing this incident report on the Friday of a long weekend [in the US]. I wonder if UniSuper was compensated for G’s fuckup. “A single default parameter vs multibillion organization. The winner may surprise you!1”
- walrus01 2y agoThe idea that you could have an automated tool delete services at the end of a term for a corporate/enterprise customer of this size and scale is absolutely absurd and inexcusable. No matter whether the parameter was set correctly or incorrectly in the first place. It should go through several levels of account manager/representative/management for manual review by a human at the google side before removal.
- ConchiGambero 2y ago[dead]