Hacker News Reader

Comment by vladimirralev | Hacker News Reader

Just less than an hour ago I got 10+ alerts that my monitoring agents on GCE machines are unreachable for 5 mins again and networking is down. I see this at least once a month, separately the cloud SQL has weird outages again about once-twice a month. I also run some real hardware machines in a datacenter and have none of these problems. I am not impressed with Google's cloud.

View on HN

Sorry to hear that; which zone are you in? I don't see any notice of an outage, but I'd be happy to investigate for you (I work on Compute Engine).

To your other issue with Cloud SQL, there is sadly a mandatory downtime with every release they do (often weekly). The team is working on it and knows it's unacceptable for serving workloads.

Edit: Here's a link to the maintenance note in the FAQ for reference - https://cloud.google.com/sql/faq#maintenancerestart

Very strange, you should be able to observe these in almost any monitor. I see this in multiple projects/networks.

Outage today was on us-central1-a. I got alerts from multiple agents - new relic, zabbix and ssh monitor so I don't think it can be blamed on tools or something like this. It happened in two bursts, this is the first one http://imgur.com/XdzuJ2r with messages from both zabbix and new relic, the time zone in the emails is EEST. These are all different machines, no duplication.

This is what I get for not being in SRE (I don't get paged, I just poll our incident lists, etc.): there was definitely a blip at that time, people are on it right now looking into the root cause (but it was automatically remediated within just a couple minutes as you saw). Regardless, sorry for the blip and for being wrong about the all clear.

Googles not alone in this, we got a lot of unexplained seemingly random outages when trying azure - it ended up being so unpredictably unreliable we found it unusable for anything important not to mention they never updated their status page.

Just remember when you contract something out to a third party, you're not subject to their SLA level but their general level of competence. This can be quite a bit lower than the SLA, even if they are high profile or expensive. If you're lucky they'll bung you a discount as compensation but don't rely on that.

I speak with experience with Google, AWS and Rackspace.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com