Hacker News Reader

If you're referring to the time they nuked an Australian retirement fund's VMware setup, no, that was basically a billing screwup. An operator left a field blank, the system assumed that meant a 1-year expiry, and dutifully deleted it after 1 year was up.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

View on HN

All mega deletes should be authorised. A human person should type in the word "delete" and then only the action should take place. Not doing this is like the decision is taken by VOID created by complex interacting systems.

Honestly unless it’s RTBF, no deletion should happen at all as long as you meet your reserve capacity of freshly silvered disks. Every defunct account should probable go to cold storage first.

We have sensible reasons to suggest this in both the cases : simple and complex.

If GCP is composed of 10-30 services (hypothetically) then keeping 5-10 employees whose job is ensure mega deletes are safe is not too much of a cost.

If GCP is composed of 500 services, then it is all the more important to have humans in the loop so ensure correct behaviour so that complex interacting services don't take a wrong action.

The most unbelievable thing about that case was that Google actually deleted data instead of keeping then forever and use for ads.

Username checks out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com