4 ms·

How much would it cost Google to just keep a few hundred webserver replicas running on some Borg cluster somewhere that do nothing but match and redirect incomi

How much would it cost Google to just keep a few hundred webserver replicas running on some Borg cluster somewhere that do nothing but match and redirect incoming requests to their destinations for a few more years? Am I underestimating the complexity of this at Google's scale?

paulpauper 2y ago
agree. a redirect costs nothing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Avamander 2y ago
To be honest all URL redirectors should be killed with fire. I loathe all the "safelinks" and similar crap in emails. Absolutely awful practice with long-lasting effects.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  my company blocks most shorteners, which make a lot of normal browsing just not work correctly due to how many sites use them now.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
More than $0. There is no consequence to turn down (and sunk cost of labor doing the work), cost to keep running is above $0. If the argument is good will, the value of good will to current state Google appears to be $0. Throw a few dollars at the Internet Archive [1], ask ArchiveTeam to add the Google link shortener to the Warrior archiver [2] [3], understand why to avoid Google in the future. [1] https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate [2] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior_projects https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior_projects [3] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam (Google DGAF about anything that doesn't make money anymore; support public goods that actually GAF)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- niutech 2y ago
  The cost to keep a single server which only responses with 301 redirection is worth pennies, or 5 minutes of Googlers' earnings. Breaking the global web is much more costly.
tedunangst 2y ago
Still gotta handle gdpr requests, etc. Also, how many "few more" years? It's already been six. I do think this sucks more than other shutdowns, because there's no practical way to off board.
nostrademons 2y ago
It's because of the constant churn in Google's shared infrastructure. I've been the maintainer for production services left orphaned by departing ex-Googlers. They usually go down within 3-6 months of their previous maintainer departing - either there's some PCR because the cluster they're homed in is going down for maintenance or transferring to another datacenter, or their dependencies migrate to a new RPC format, or somebody sticks a new quota on internal requests for a service, or your PA loses machine budgets, or your RPC deadlines are now more than the average latency for that service. It's stupid stuff like that - assumptions that worked a few years ago don't work anymore when the infrastructure is a moving target. Google's code is immensely complex, so once the institutional knowledge goes out the door, debugging and fixing problems becomes very difficult. Your maintainer, once the original author has left, is probably doing this as an unfunded 20% project; she will get zero credit on her performance review for making sure that a service her VP doesn't care about stays up. So it's usually easier to do nothing and just let it start failing. Announcing a turndown is actually a courtesy in this case.
- nitwit005 2y ago
  I am at a different large company. We got a pile of alerts for a service's staging environment being unused. Of course it's unused, we haven't done a release in months. We clicked the appeal process on those alerts. You could tell from their response that this was a novel concept.
- worksonmine 2y ago
  > Google's code is immensely complex, so once the institutional knowledge goes out the door, debugging and fixing problems becomes very difficult. How complex can a static (since there's no new URLs being added) URL shortener get? If it's really that bad just rewrite it to something simpler in an afternoon and be done with it. It must be a better option than the bad will of sunsetting something like this will generate no?
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    Ha ha ha. Have you seen the Broccoli Man short? And that was a satire of what Google's infrastructure looked like in 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI
niutech 2y ago
Few hundred webservers? It could be a single VPS with a single script just looking up the alias in database (possibly SQLite) and serving the 301 redirect.

paulpauper 2y ago

agree. a redirect costs nothing.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Avamander 2y ago

To be honest all URL redirectors should be killed with fire. I loathe all the "safelinks" and similar crap in emails. Absolutely awful practice with long-lasting effects.

Suppafly 2y ago
my company blocks most shorteners, which make a lot of normal browsing just not work correctly due to how many sites use them now.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

More than $0. There is no consequence to turn down (and sunk cost of labor doing the work), cost to keep running is above $0. If the argument is good will, the value of good will to current state Google appears to be $0. Throw a few dollars at the Internet Archive [1], ask ArchiveTeam to add the Google link shortener to the Warrior archiver [2] [3], understand why to avoid Google in the future. [1] https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate [2] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior_projects https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Warrior_projects [3] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam (Google DGAF about anything that doesn't make money anymore; support public goods that actually GAF)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
niutech 2y ago
The cost to keep a single server which only responses with 301 redirection is worth pennies, or 5 minutes of Googlers' earnings. Breaking the global web is much more costly.

tedunangst 2y ago

Still gotta handle gdpr requests, etc. Also, how many "few more" years? It's already been six. I do think this sucks more than other shutdowns, because there's no practical way to off board.

nostrademons 2y ago

It's because of the constant churn in Google's shared infrastructure. I've been the maintainer for production services left orphaned by departing ex-Googlers. They usually go down within 3-6 months of their previous maintainer departing - either there's some PCR because the cluster they're homed in is going down for maintenance or transferring to another datacenter, or their dependencies migrate to a new RPC format, or somebody sticks a new quota on internal requests for a service, or your PA loses machine budgets, or your RPC deadlines are now more than the average latency for that service. It's stupid stuff like that - assumptions that worked a few years ago don't work anymore when the infrastructure is a moving target. Google's code is immensely complex, so once the institutional knowledge goes out the door, debugging and fixing problems becomes very difficult. Your maintainer, once the original author has left, is probably doing this as an unfunded 20% project; she will get zero credit on her performance review for making sure that a service her VP doesn't care about stays up. So it's usually easier to do nothing and just let it start failing. Announcing a turndown is actually a courtesy in this case.

nitwit005 2y ago
I am at a different large company. We got a pile of alerts for a service's staging environment being unused. Of course it's unused, we haven't done a release in months. We clicked the appeal process on those alerts. You could tell from their response that this was a novel concept.
worksonmine 2y ago
> Google's code is immensely complex, so once the institutional knowledge goes out the door, debugging and fixing problems becomes very difficult. How complex can a static (since there's no new URLs being added) URL shortener get? If it's really that bad just rewrite it to something simpler in an afternoon and be done with it. It must be a better option than the bad will of sunsetting something like this will generate no?
- nostrademons 2y ago
  Ha ha ha. Have you seen the Broccoli Man short? And that was a satire of what Google's infrastructure looked like in 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

niutech 2y ago

Few hundred webservers? It could be a single VPS with a single script just looking up the alias in database (possibly SQLite) and serving the 301 redirect.