On: Google Cloud Is Down

[snazz]

How can they possibly guarantee eleven nines? Considering I’ve never heard of this company and they offer such crazy-sounding improvements over the big three, it feels like there should be a catch.

[ignoramous → snazz]

11 9s isn't uncommon. AWS S3 does 11 9s (upto 16 9s with cross region replication?) for data durability, too. AFAIK, AWS published papers about their use of formal methods to ascertain bugs from other parts of the system didn't creep in to affect durability/availability guarantees: https://blog.acolyer.org/2014/11/24/use-of-formal-methods-at...

This is a pretty neat and concise read on ObjectStorage in-use at BigTech, in case you're interested: https://maisonbisson.com/post/object-storage-prior-art-and-l...

[nullwasamistake → ignoramous]

You have to be kidding me. 14 9's is already microseconds a year. Surely below anybody's error bar for whether a service is down or not.

16 9's and aws should easily last as long as the great pyramids without a second worth of outage.

What a joke

[agwa → nullwasamistake]

The 16 9's are for durability, not availability. AWS is not saying S3 will never go down; they're saying it will rarely lose your data.

[nullwasamistake → agwa]

This number is still total bullshit. They could lose a few kb and be above that for centuries

[deanCommie → nullwasamistake]

It's not about losing a few kb here and there.

It's about losing entire data centers to massive natural disasters once in a century.

[jefftk → nullwasamistake]

None of the big cloud providers have unrecoverably lost hosted data yet, despite sorting vast volumes, so this doesn't seem BS to me.

[mentat → jefftk]

AWS lost data in Australia a few years ago due to a power outage I believe.

[anbop → mentat]

on EBS, not on S3. EBS has much lower durability guarantees

[nullwasamistake → jefftk]

Not losing any data yet doesn't give justification for such absurd numbers

[joshuamorton → nullwasamistake]

Those numbers probably aren't as absurd as you think. 16 9s is, I think 10 bytes lost per exabyte-year of data storage.

There's perhaps the additional asterisk of "and we haven't suffered a catastrophic event that entirely puts us out of business". (Which is maybe only terrorist attacks). Because then you're talking about losing data only when cosmic-ray bitflips happen simultaneously in data centers on different continents, which I'd expect doesn't happen too often.

[joshuamorton → nullwasamistake]

This is for data loss. 11 9s is like 1 byte lost per terabyte-year or something, which isn't an unreasonable number.

[StreamBright → nullwasamistake]

This is why I linked the SLA page which you obviously have not read. There are different numbers for durability and availability.

[johnmaguire → snazz]

For data durability? I believe some AWS offerings also have an SLA of eleven 9's of data durability.

[sascha_sl → snazz]

11 9s of durability, barely two 9s of availability

I'm sure that's okay if you do bulk processing / time-independent analysis, but don't host production assets on wasabi.