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Hosting your status page on the same infrastructure it is reporting on is the most idiotic thing a service can do.

Seems like the status page was on separate infra (I could access it while the GCP services were down), but Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8) was also down.

Perhaps alexdumitru was using 8.8.8.8?

You're right, I'm using 8.8.8.8.

It's tough, though. The PR embarrassment of hosting your Google Cloud status page on AWS, say, would be substantial.

I’m sure google can afford some colo space (probably would be cheaper too)

Sure, but what’s more likely to be reliable: GCP/AWS or a colo?

It’s also embarrassing (and can cause stress for your customers) when your status page is down.

A separate failure domain / uncorrelated failure can be more important than the absolute rate of failure.

Imo for simple deployment colo with a major provider (equinix, coresite, etc) and redundant transit beats any cloud on reliability hands down

How do you know that there isn't a disaster plan under which Google routes requests for status.cloud.google.com to some other, non-Google host?

I honestly have no idea, hope they do. My point is aws is not the only alternative (and not even the best one) for setting this up.

Makes me think of a calculus word problem: As the things Google cannot afford approaches 0...

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