A week of downtime and all the servers were recovered only because the customer had a proper disaster recovery protocol and held backups somewhere else, otherwise Google deleted the backups too

Google cloud ceo says “it won’t happen anymore”, it’s insane that there’s the possibility of “instant delete everything”

206 points

Remember people: The cloud is just someone else’s computer.

permalink
report
reply
27 points

Yeah there’s that, and the fact that you have no control over how much the bill will be each renewal period. Those two things kept me off the cloud for anything important.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Most cloud providers have a way to set limits. Make sure you learn how to set appropriate limits to avoid unexpected bills.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

The limits don’t matter if the provider raises their price next month.

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points

Unless its a self-hosted cloud. Then its your own computers

permalink
report
parent
reply

thats why i am trying to explain to my family since forever. their answer always amounts to something like “it would be illegal for them to look at my data!” like those companies would care. .

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

in many cases “looking at my data!” is in their TOS

permalink
report
parent
reply
146 points
*

They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

Bullshit. I’ve heard of people having their Google accounts randomly banned or even deleted before. Remember when the Terraria devs cancelled the Stadia port of Terraria because Google randomly banned their account and then took weeks to acknowledge it? The only reason why Google responded so quickly to this is because the super fund manages over $100b and could sue the absolute fuck out of Google.

permalink
report
reply
54 points

This happened to me years ago. Suddenly got a random community guidelines violation on YouTube for a 3 second VFX shot that was not pornographic or violent and that I owned all the rights to. After that my whole Google account was locked down. I never found out what triggered this response and I could never resolve the issue with them since I only ever got automated responses. Fuck Google.

permalink
report
parent
reply
17 points

This sort of story is what made me switch away from Google Fi and ultimately mostly degoogling. Privacy was a big part later on, but initially it was realizing that a YouTube comment or a file in my drive could get my cell service turned off.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points
*

one of my accounts was locked for no reason once. i apparently did well to not trust important data to them anymore.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?

Super fund, short for superannuation fund.

Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.

A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

I was just going off the secondary headline. They called it a super fund, so that’s what I called it.

permalink
report
parent
reply
47 points

Tbh I do not understand why would a company keep their data on a service like Google Cloud

permalink
report
reply
45 points

Because accountants mostly.

For large businesses, you essentially have two ways to spend money:

  • OPEX: “operational expenditure” - this is money that you send on an ongoing basis, things like rent, wages, the 3rd party cleaning company, cloud services etc. The expectation is that when you use OPEX, the money disappears off the books and you don’t get a tangible thing back in return. Most departments will have an OPEX budget to spend for the year.
  • CAPEX: “capital expenditure” - buying physical stuff, things like buildings, stock, machinery and servers. When you buy a physical thing, it gets listed as an asset on the company accounts, usually being “worth” whatever you paid for it. The problem is that things tend to lose value over time (with the exception of property), so when you buy a thing the accountants will want to know a depreciation rate - how much value it will lose per year. For computer equipment, this is typically ~20%, being “worthless” in 5 years. Departments typically don’t have a big CAPEX budget, and big purchases typically need to be approved by the company board.

This leaves companies in a slightly odd spot where from an accounting standpoint, it might look better on the books to spend $3 million/year on cloud stuff than $10 million every 5 years on servers

permalink
report
parent
reply
25 points

Excellent explanation, however, technically it does not constitute an “odd spot.” Rather, it represents a “100% acceptable and evident position” as it brings benefits to all stakeholders, from accounting to the CEO. Moreover, it is noteworthy that investing in services or leasing arrangements increases expenditure, resulting in reduced tax liabilities due to lower reported profits. Compounding this, the prevailing high turnover rate among CEOs diminishes incentives for making significant long-term investments.

In certain instances, there is also plain corruption. This occurs when a supplier offering services such as computer and server leasing or software, as well as company car rentals, is owned by a friend or family member of a C-level executive.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

Been around, have you?

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I read OPs comment as being a question about using a company with a reputation like Google rather than using a cloud service, but I could be wrong.

permalink
report
parent
reply
36 points

Money. It’s a lot cheaper to let somebody else maintain your systems than to pay somebody to create and maintain your own, directly.

permalink
report
parent
reply
27 points

Flexibility is a huge one too. Much easier to upscale / downscale.

permalink
report
parent
reply
15 points

If you are a small company then yes. But i would argue that for larger companies this doesn’t hold true. If you have 200 employees you’ll need an IT department either way. You need IT expertise either way. So having some people who know how to plan, implement and maintain physical hardware makes sense too.

There is a breaking point between economics of scale and the added efforts to coordinate between your company and the service provider plus paying that service providers overhead and profits.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

If coordinating with service providers is hard for a firm, I would argue the cost effective answer isn’t “let’s do all this in house”. Many big finance firms fall in this trap of thinking it’s cheaper to build v buy, and that’s how you get everyone building their own worse versions of everything. Whether your firm is good at the markets or kitchens or travel bookings, thinking you can efficiently in-source tech is a huge fallacy.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points
*

Except for the larger companies you still need a bunch of trained experts in house to manage everything.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Yes, and they’re the company’s resources so they theoretically do what’s best for the company as opposed to hoping Google or (godforbid Microsoft) does it.

The money gets paid either way, and if you have good people it’s often the right call to keep it in house but inevitably somebody read a business book last year and wants to layoff all the IT people and let Google handle it “for savings”. Later directors are amazed at how much money they’re spending just to host and use the data they used to have in-house because they don’t own anything anymore.

There are still benefits - cloud DevOps tools are usually pretty slick, and unless your company has built a bunch of those already or is good about doing it, it might still be worth it in terms of being able to change quickly. But it’s still a version of the age old IT maxim to never own or build it yourself when you can pay someone a huge subscription and then sue them if you have to. I don’t like it, but it’s pretty much iron in the executive suite.

As a result, IT departments or companies spend much more than half of their time - totalling years or decades - moving from whatever they were using to whatever is supposed to be better. Almost all of that effort is barely break-even if not wasted. That’s just the nature of the beast.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

It’s absolutely not. If you are at any kind of scale whatsoever, your yearly spend will be a minimum of 2x at a cloud provider rather then creating and operating the same system locally including all the employees, contracts, etc.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

It very frequently is not.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
-8 points
*

No I meant that Google Cloud is very invasive. Why not to use a more ethical provider?

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

Why do you think it’s invasive? How do you quantify which providers are less invasive?

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

G Suite is a legitimate option for small-medium businesses. It’s seen as the cheaper, simpler option versus Azure. I usually recommend it for nonprofits as they have a decent free option for 501c3 orgs.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

My company used to do this. Its cause we were incredibly stupid.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Money and Time – It’s rather easier/cheaper for Organizations nowadays to outsource a part of infra to Cloud service providers.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I meant Google Cloud, not cloud outsourcing itself

permalink
report
parent
reply
47 points
*

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened.

I don’t believe this is what that rare, what I believe is that this was the fist time it happened to a company with enough exposure to actually have in impact and reach the media.

Either way Google’s image won’t ever recover from this and they just lost what small credibility they had on the cloud space and won’t be even considered again by any institution in the financial market - you know the people with the big money - and there’s no coming back from this.

permalink
report
reply
13 points
*

It has 100% happened before and just never been admitted to. I have both 1st hand dealt with the aftermath and heard from other smaller companies about it. I work at medium sized MSP and disaster recovery is in my wheelhouse.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Thank you for confirming my suspicions. :)

permalink
report
parent
reply
30 points

@Moonrise2473 Regardless of one thinks about “cloud” solutions, this is a good example, why you always should have an offsite backup.

permalink
report
reply
5 points

They had backups at multiple locations, and lost data at multiple (Google Cloud) locations because of the account deletion.

They restored from backups stored at another provider. It may have been more devastating if they relied exclusively on google for backups. So having an “offsite backup” isn’t enough in some cases, that offsite location need to be at a different provider.

permalink
report
parent
reply
6 points

@Hirom With “offsite” I mean either a different cloud provider or own hardware (if you hold your regular data at some cloud provider, like in this case).

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

That would indeed be a good backup strategy, but better be specific. “Offsite” may be interpreted in different ways.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

It may have been more devastating if they relied exclusively on google for backups.

Which is why having any data, despite the number of backups, on a cloud provider shouldn’t be seen as off-site.

Only when it is truly outside their ecosphere and cannot be touched by them should it be viewed as such.

If that company didn’t have such resilience built into their backup plan, they would be toast with a derisory amount of compensation from Google.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Having a backup at a cloud provider is fine, as long as there is at least one other backup that isn’t with this provider.

Cloud provider seems to do a good job protecting against hardware failure, but can do poorly with arbitrary account bans, and sometimes have mishaps due to configuration problems.

Whereas a DIY backup solution is often more subject to hardware problems (disk failure, fire, flooding, theft, …), but there’s no risk of account problem.

A mix is fine to protect against different kind of issues.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Technology

!technology@lemmy.ml

Create post

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

Community stats

  • 3.2K

    Monthly active users

  • 2.9K

    Posts

  • 45K

    Comments

Community moderators