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> GCE "is a long-term strategic bet for the company," said Brian Goldfarb, Google's head of cloud platform marketing, adding that "we have an incredibly high ba

> GCE "is a long-term strategic bet for the company," said Brian Goldfarb, Google's head of cloud platform marketing, adding that "we have an incredibly high bar for what general availability means." and > The company has established a service level agreement (SLA) where it guarantees GCE to be available 99.95% of the time Doesn't seem to match. (99.95% is a really high bar? 20 minutes per month? from Google?! ) [EDIT] Misunderstanding of the vocabulary on my part, read further down.

rll 13y ago
Seems they are just trying to match EC2 here, not beat them. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/ says 99.95% as well.
- rurounijones 13y ago
  Breaking news, Google admits Amazon has set an "Incredibly high bar" with regards to High Availability :p
thezilch 13y ago
Rackspace will only give 3 9s.
nknighthb 13y ago
Yes it's a high bar. This isn't electricity or a phone line. There are complex layers on top of complex layers. And they are going to come crashing down at some point. The cost of ensuring otherwise scales non-linearly. I don't want my VM to cost a substantial fraction of a Space Shuttle, thank you.
- rurounijones 13y ago
  Condescending tone aside: They have matched Amazon - As far as I am concerned "meeting the standard set by a competitor" is not something worth gushing about for someone like Google. Maybe I still have the veneer of "Google have the best in the world" in my thinking, but Google "setting a high bar" is beating the competition, not matching it.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    > Google "setting a high bar" is beating the competition, not matching it Good thing nobody said "setting a high bar", then. You're choosing to read the statement in strained manner that doesn't match my reading of its intended meaning at all.
    - bgoldy 13y ago
      We could get into and endless debate about SLA's, their meaning, and their value. I don't think our bar for GA and the SLA are correlated. nknighthb's interpretation is correct. The bar has to do with a wide variety of other factors including our commitment to the business, how we are focusing on customer support, view of go to market and investments there, technical aspects like performance consistency, data throughput, peering, private backbones, encryption at rest, hardware, and so many other layers. We could have just said "GA" in May at IO when we also had an SLA of 99.95% but the SLA isn't even close to enough. It's just a factor and definitely not the most important one. Hope this helps clarify :) -Brian
      - rurounijones 13y ago
        Hang on, I think I have just realised a mistake on my part. In your quote on the site when you said "General Availabilty" you were referring to the releあse. I mis-understood, I thought you were referring to "General Availability" as a synonym for uptime (Probably translated to "High Availability" in my head), not in the "released to General Availability" sense. My apologies to all.
  - chaz 13y ago
    Like Amazon.com and AWS, Google.com doesn't share the same infrastructure as GCE. So while the employee experience and expertise may carry over, the infrastructure doesn't. EC2 had serious outages even though Amazon.com stayed up and running. And GCE only offers 3 data centers compared to the 13 that they have for their core. I'm not even sure the 3 they offer intersect with the 13. It's a new line of business, and expect some serious rough patches. Google's brand will immediately step it up to a top-tier provider, but how they handle outages and deliver innovation will really dictate how well it plays out in the marketplace.

rll 13y ago

Seems they are just trying to match EC2 here, not beat them. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla/ says 99.95% as well.

rurounijones 13y ago
Breaking news, Google admits Amazon has set an "Incredibly high bar" with regards to High Availability :p

thezilch 13y ago

Rackspace will only give 3 9s.

nknighthb 13y ago

Yes it's a high bar. This isn't electricity or a phone line. There are complex layers on top of complex layers. And they are going to come crashing down at some point. The cost of ensuring otherwise scales non-linearly. I don't want my VM to cost a substantial fraction of a Space Shuttle, thank you.

rurounijones 13y ago
Condescending tone aside: They have matched Amazon - As far as I am concerned "meeting the standard set by a competitor" is not something worth gushing about for someone like Google. Maybe I still have the veneer of "Google have the best in the world" in my thinking, but Google "setting a high bar" is beating the competition, not matching it.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  > Google "setting a high bar" is beating the competition, not matching it Good thing nobody said "setting a high bar", then. You're choosing to read the statement in strained manner that doesn't match my reading of its intended meaning at all.
  - bgoldy 13y ago
    We could get into and endless debate about SLA's, their meaning, and their value. I don't think our bar for GA and the SLA are correlated. nknighthb's interpretation is correct. The bar has to do with a wide variety of other factors including our commitment to the business, how we are focusing on customer support, view of go to market and investments there, technical aspects like performance consistency, data throughput, peering, private backbones, encryption at rest, hardware, and so many other layers. We could have just said "GA" in May at IO when we also had an SLA of 99.95% but the SLA isn't even close to enough. It's just a factor and definitely not the most important one. Hope this helps clarify :) -Brian
    - rurounijones 13y ago
      Hang on, I think I have just realised a mistake on my part. In your quote on the site when you said "General Availabilty" you were referring to the releあse. I mis-understood, I thought you were referring to "General Availability" as a synonym for uptime (Probably translated to "High Availability" in my head), not in the "released to General Availability" sense. My apologies to all.
- chaz 13y ago
  Like Amazon.com and AWS, Google.com doesn't share the same infrastructure as GCE. So while the employee experience and expertise may carry over, the infrastructure doesn't. EC2 had serious outages even though Amazon.com stayed up and running. And GCE only offers 3 data centers compared to the 13 that they have for their core. I'm not even sure the 3 they offer intersect with the 13. It's a new line of business, and expect some serious rough patches. Google's brand will immediately step it up to a top-tier provider, but how they handle outages and deliver innovation will really dictate how well it plays out in the marketplace.