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The Google Cloud Hiccups, do we have the Right to Complain?

Posted 10/19/08 at 08:59:08 PM  by Justin Kerr

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A Google Apps malfunction was reported on Thursday leaving education edition users without access to various services, including Gmail. It turns out the loss of access was tied to an unannounced change in the layouts of start pages which redirected to a non functional iGoogle address. Google spokesmen Andrew Kovacs stated that "this was an isolated bug".  "I don't want to minimize this, but was this an issue where people could not access their data? No."  Google hasn’t publically stated how many of the over one million businesses and 10 million users were impacted by the bug, but apparently it was only reported by a handful of users.  Kovacs went on to state that "Basically, the broader perspective with an approach to communication is to be transparent. With these hosted applications we are held to a higher standard since we are so transparent with our communication." This made me wonder. With all the negative back lash companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon receive when cloud services crash, is all the bad press really fair? Do we really have the right to expect 100% uptime?

Let us know what you think.
Storm Cloud

COMMENTS:5
TAGS: Google, hardware, cloud computing, grid computing, google apps, server crash
COMMENTS
avatarWhat you pay for...

Submitted by neo1piv14 on Mon, 10/20/2008 - 6:28am

People pay hundreds of dollars for an office suite that doesn't work all the time. People pay many more hundreds for an OS that crashes because of an ill thought out patch. People pay hundreds for LCD monitors that might have bad pixels, and noone shows the lack of faith in a product like they do when a free service like Google Apps goes down for a little while. Hell, at least Google was honest and open about their mess-up.  Until software that you're paying for is 100%, try cutting the free stuff some slack. Remember, it could not work at all, and you'd still get your money's worth

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avatarIn short, NO

Submitted by NAYRhyno on Mon, 10/20/2008 - 4:24am

Since when have you truly expected 100% uptime from your own PC?  From your business servers? from ANYTHING?  Outages are a fact of life in a digital world, just like fires are a fact of life in paper world.  This is why backups exist.

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avatarIf I can't access my apps

Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Sun, 10/19/2008 - 9:00pm

If I can't access my apps whenever I need to then how the (insert F Bomb Here) is Cloud computing better than software that I install on my PC and can access at anytime? Your a F'ing retard to utilize Cloud Computing for anything other than bare basic crap like Email.

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avatar100% uptime absolutely

Submitted by zeringue on Sun, 10/19/2008 - 6:50pm

The google apps service free/paid versions should have 100% available uptimes. Google operates mulitple datacenters and should have numerous replicas of the same data throughout the world with along with servers serving up the same pages, when was the last time www.google.com did not open? Google obviously is not QCing its production environment and not paying enough attention the services people rely on.

At the very least 5 nines of uptime.

My company was considering moving to Google apps, if we did we might of suffered a 30 hour outage without service, and many hours of lost labor costs.

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avatarIf you pay for the apps,

Submitted by Digital-Storm on Mon, 10/20/2008 - 2:16am

If you pay for the apps, yes, you should expect atleast 99.9% uptime. If you are just using free apps, no, you have absolutly no right to expect a 100% uptime.

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