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Google App Engine Broken For 4 Hours And Counting
- tybris 17y agoCloud outages may not be frequent, but they sure are noticeable.
- peter123 17y agoThis is worse than the 8-hr outage of S3 sometime ago... most apps could still respond without S3 static assets. If your entire app is hosted on AppEngine, you're screwed for 4 hrs and counting...
- slig 17y ago> This is worse than the 8-hr outage of S3 sometime ago I don't think so. Javascript files hosted os s3 would hang the page loading and without css/images the app would be useless too.
- peter123 17y agoBut you could quickly recover by hosting those JS files yourself and relinking them. If your app is coupled tightly with AppEngine APIs, then there is nowhere else you can host your app.
- tlrobinson 17y agoTheoretically you could fire up AppScale on EC2: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/ http://code.google.com/p/appscale/
- drusenko 17y agoWhat about your data? Most web applications have persistent data of some sort that is vital to the user experience -- without it, you don't have much of a site. [Edit: And keeping a hot copy of that data is a lot harder than it sounds]
- danw 17y agoGAE still had read-only access to data so it would be possible to backup and move elsewhere
- sschueller 17y agoAt least we got a detailed explanation from AWS as to what happened and what was put in place to prevent it from happening again.
- ezmobius 17y agomulti-tenant architectures are the geocities of cloud computing. This is the main problem with something like gae, if they have an internal problem it takes down their entire cloud and all the apps with it.
- grandalf 17y agowhich means that a lot more people are mad and it gets fixed sooner. Have you ever had a problem with cable tv or phone service that just effects your home? It can take weeks. If it effects a whole city, it is fixed within hours.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- andrewljohnson 17y agoI concur, my blog on App Engine is down.
- jpeterson 17y agoWhat's the point of hosting in a cloud if there's still a single point of failure like this? I realize that it's currently free, but I thought one of the main advantages of moving to the cloud was redundancy and fault tolerance.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 17y agothis is a bit like flying vs driving. If you're in the drivers seat you have control - you hope - and your destiny is in your own hands, if you're in a plane it is someone else driving (unless you are an airline pilot). The accident rate is lower for planes per mile flown but if it goes wrong then it usually does so in ways that make the headlines. Still, more people die driving than flying. When the 'cloud' goes down (or at least some part of it) then you'll notice this immediately because of the large number of sites going down all at once. But when you compare it with the accumulated downtime of all those users had they not been 'cloud users' but hosted on their own kit then it is very well possible that the balance is still in favour of hosting in the cloud.
- wvenable 17y agoI do my own hosting, but I agree with this completely. Downtime at any scale is inevitable, but with Google's massive infrastructure you're far better off.
- asmithmd1 17y agoGreat analogy. I would rather have all the big Brains at Google working to solve the problem instead of my puny brain working trying to restart my server
- enjo 17y agoMore specifically: We have no real network administrators. Within our engineering team we collectively have the skill to be an effective at systems administration, but the hardware side is really a complete mystery. Co-location mostly solves that, but the cloud takes it a step further. By running in a virtualized environment we can handle what we're good at it and let others build complex data centers to scale our traffic. When your bootstrapping a start-up, that's just huge.
- skorgu 17y agoThe cloud is just an enormous SPOF. I like having my own kit somewhere in the loop if only to throw a proper error message.
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- bryanwoods 17y agoI'm so tired of reading about web servers/services going down.
- jrockway 17y agoYou are supposed to say something clever like, "Too bad TechCrunch isn't hosted on App Engine..."
- defied 17y agoAt least their communication is good: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/browse_thread/thread/f7596d1d0bd0f0f9?hl=en&pli=1 http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-not...
- jbox 17y agoI disagree. The GAE status page was down for hours: http://code.google.com/status/appengine http://code.google.com/status/appengine What's the point of having a status page it's only up as long as your service? We shouldn't have to hunt around a Google Group for information about what's going on.
- drcode 17y agohmm... My appengine site is running just fine Update: Actually, my app is in the "read only mode" they described... the moment I tried to update anything it went to hell :)
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoThe bad thing is we can do nothing but wait. The good thing is we don't have to do anything but wait ;-)
- drcode 17y agoNow fixed again, as per my own app and as per http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/browse_thread/thread/f7596d1d0bd0f0f9?hl=en http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-not...