3 ms·

What if you have dozens of big data centers?

jiggawatts 2y ago
To reinforce your point: The scale of cloud data centres reflects the scale of their customer base, not the size of the basket for each individual customer. Larger data centres actually improve availability through several mechanisms: more power components such as generators means the failure of any one is just a few percent instead of a total blackout. You can also partition core infrastructure like routers and power rails into more fault domains and update domains. Some large clouds have two update domains and five fault domains on top of three zones that are more than 10km apart. You can’t beat ~30 individual partitions with your data centres at a reasonable cost!
- belter 2y ago
  I provided three different references. Despite the massive downvotes on my comment I guess by Google engineers, as a troll...:-)I take comfort on the fact nobody was able to advance a reference to prove me wrong.
  - joshuamorton 2y ago
    You haven't actually made an argument. It is true that the nomenclature "AWS Availability Zone" has a different meaning than "GCP Zone" when discussing the physical separation between zones within the same region. It's unclear why this is inherently a bad thing, as long as them same overall level of reliability is achieved.
    - belter 2y ago
      The phrase "as long as the same overall level of reliability is achieved" is logically flawed when discussing physically co-located vs. geographically separated infrastructure.
      - joshuamorton 2y ago
        Justify that claim. In my experience, the set of issues that would affect 2 buildings close to each other, but not two buildings a mile apart, is vanishingly small, usually just last mile fiber cuts or power issues (which are rare and mitigated by having multiple independent providers), as well as issues like building fires (which are exceedingly rare, we know of, perhaps two of notable impact in more than a decade across the big three cloud providers). Everything else is done at the zone level no matter what (onsite repair work, rollouts, upgrades, control plane changes, etc.) or can impact an entire region (non-last mile fiber or power cuts, inclement weather, regional power starvation, etc.) There is a potential gain from physical zone isolation, but it protects against a relatively small set of issues. Is it really better to invest in that, or to invest the resources in other safety improvements?
        retinaros 2y ago
        what happened in gcp paris region then?
        joshuamorton 2y ago
        One of the vanishingly small set of issues I mentioned. It is true, and obvious, that GCP and AWS and Azure use different architectures. It does not obviously follow that any of those architectures are inherently more reliable. And even if it did, it doesn't obviously follow that any of the platforms are inherently more reliable due to a specific architectural decision. Like, all cloud providers still have regional outages.
        belter 2y ago
        I think you should have started this discussion by disclosing you work at Google... > One of the vanishingly small set of issues At your scale, this attitude is even more concerning since the rare event at scale is not rare anymore.
        2y ago
  - nl 2y ago
    AWS Zone is sort-roughly-kinda a GCP Region. It sounds like you want multi-region: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones
    - belter 2y ago
      > It sounds like you want multi-region If you use Google Cloud....with the 100 ms of latency that will add to every interaction....

To reinforce your point: The scale of cloud data centres reflects the scale of their customer base, not the size of the basket for each individual customer. Larger data centres actually improve availability through several mechanisms: more power components such as generators means the failure of any one is just a few percent instead of a total blackout. You can also partition core infrastructure like routers and power rails into more fault domains and update domains. Some large clouds have two update domains and five fault domains on top of three zones that are more than 10km apart. You can’t beat ~30 individual partitions with your data centres at a reasonable cost!

belter 2y ago
I provided three different references. Despite the massive downvotes on my comment I guess by Google engineers, as a troll...:-)I take comfort on the fact nobody was able to advance a reference to prove me wrong.
- joshuamorton 2y ago
  You haven't actually made an argument. It is true that the nomenclature "AWS Availability Zone" has a different meaning than "GCP Zone" when discussing the physical separation between zones within the same region. It's unclear why this is inherently a bad thing, as long as them same overall level of reliability is achieved.
  - belter 2y ago
    The phrase "as long as the same overall level of reliability is achieved" is logically flawed when discussing physically co-located vs. geographically separated infrastructure.
    - joshuamorton 2y ago
      Justify that claim. In my experience, the set of issues that would affect 2 buildings close to each other, but not two buildings a mile apart, is vanishingly small, usually just last mile fiber cuts or power issues (which are rare and mitigated by having multiple independent providers), as well as issues like building fires (which are exceedingly rare, we know of, perhaps two of notable impact in more than a decade across the big three cloud providers). Everything else is done at the zone level no matter what (onsite repair work, rollouts, upgrades, control plane changes, etc.) or can impact an entire region (non-last mile fiber or power cuts, inclement weather, regional power starvation, etc.) There is a potential gain from physical zone isolation, but it protects against a relatively small set of issues. Is it really better to invest in that, or to invest the resources in other safety improvements?
      - retinaros 2y ago
        what happened in gcp paris region then?
        joshuamorton 2y ago
        One of the vanishingly small set of issues I mentioned. It is true, and obvious, that GCP and AWS and Azure use different architectures. It does not obviously follow that any of those architectures are inherently more reliable. And even if it did, it doesn't obviously follow that any of the platforms are inherently more reliable due to a specific architectural decision. Like, all cloud providers still have regional outages.
        belter 2y ago
        I think you should have started this discussion by disclosing you work at Google... > One of the vanishingly small set of issues At your scale, this attitude is even more concerning since the rare event at scale is not rare anymore.
        2y ago
- nl 2y ago
  AWS Zone is sort-roughly-kinda a GCP Region. It sounds like you want multi-region: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones
  - belter 2y ago
    > It sounds like you want multi-region If you use Google Cloud....with the 100 ms of latency that will add to every interaction....