Notify HN: There is currently an AppEngine outage | Hacker News Reader

Notify HN: There is currently an AppEngine outage

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29 pointsicey18 comments

I use AppEngine, Heroku, and Amazon AWS often - for me, the very rare outages are just noise.

Seriously, sometimes (not often but it happens) my bank's web portal, my health insurance's web portal, etc. are down -- not the end of the world, just wait a while and try again.

Web portal outages are not life threatening. I am willing to trade very rare outages for ease of use and inexpensive deployment platforms.

Q: how many people here have businesses where a few hours a month of your web portal outages (if that) seriously affect your bottom line profitability?

I have a little blogger gadget getting 2.5M impressions a day that runs on App Engine. I don't particularly care if app engine is down for an hour or not.

I can't wait until the day (if ever) that I am making enough money on my web services to actually be worried about these kinds of outages.

There is a little more information here:

http://code.google.com/status/appengine

[edit] It's back up now.

Just wondering how they are calculating

Current Availability 83.64%

My guess is Successful Response/Request ratio.

Happy that their status page stay up this time. Last time (236 days ago) this happened, it was not.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685093

This annoyed my users and annoyed me. I serve my website and the Help section of my iPhone app from AppEngine.

It's also worth pointing out that the outage was preceded by horrible performance issues, and I wonder why they didn't take a cue and prevent an all out outage. This mailing list post doesn't even begin to explain what happened, and that peeves me a bit too.

I felt like a stooge telling my users yesterday that this was AppEngine's fault and I couldn't do anything about it. That's always a terrible thing to have to say to a user. I'm thinking about moving this site to EC2 with my other.

I'm thinking about moving this site to EC2 with my other. Is telling your customer it is Amazon's fault somehow better than blaming Google? http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/10/04/on-our-extended-downtim... Sure that was technically an EBS problem but still the point stands nothing is perfect and as long as you don't own the internet you rely on someone somewhere for something, it can break and the fault to lie with someone else.

The only difference is my EC2 site has been running continuously without supervision for months, and my AppEngine site often has glitches.

Nothing is perfect, but some things are better.

For hours yesterday the majority the hits to my app engine site were timing out against the 30 second deadline exceeded error, usually while initializing django and the logs said they'd received less than 500ms of cpu time. There were other similar complaints on the message board. It took google a full day to admit there was a problem. I love how easy the app engine is, but this does make me think about migrating.

Actually, I retract that. I just checked the app engine message board again (my post had been delayed for moderation yesterday), and a google engineer responded and offered to look into everyone's apps, and he'd resolved the issue for the others.

Seems like even their administrative panel is down, so I can't even log in...

http://appengine.google.com/

I'd been considering using AppEngine for small project, but I'm not sure I can rely on it for even that.

There were some issues following a 30 minute maintenance last week (which fell during a USA early evening period as it was) that lasted for several hours, and now this.

Give AppEngine a chance, you may like the way it works. Yes, the downtime sucks, but Google will at least be fairly honest about the reasons which is generally better than my previous host. Which got their machine owned, and my PHP scripts backdoored and they said it was a simple hardware issue.

Overall I have been really impressed with Google AppEngine, it has served my needs. I'm not happy about the downtime, but as a paying customer I'll just email them and generally I'll end up getting credited for the downtime.

Damn interns....

edit: I've broken things massively as an intern...

"We sincerely apologies for the inconvenience".

Sounds like AppEngine is being run by a bunch of Nigerian spammers.

I for one, blame Python's GIL! rolls eyes

Notify HN: I just finished my breakfast. It was Granola.

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