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Why you should be glad about Gmail failures | |
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| Time: 00:00 EST/05:00 GMT | News Source: ZDNet | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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With every Gmail fail, Google learns more about operating a cloud-scale, enterprise-class email infrastructure. While it may be true that Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have more registered users and traffic, neither of them are trying to attract enterprise customers as Google is with its Google Apps suite (of which Gmail is the flagship application). That means no one has ever attempted what Gmail is now doing, and with each slip-up along the way, it learns how to do it better. | ||
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| #1 By 7754 (206.169.247.2) at 9/25/2009 1:01:25 AM |
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That's a fantastic excuse--that the customer should be thankful for failures, since it's a learning opportunity for the provider. I will definitely have to remember that one for my boss should I have to account for a system outage (thankfully that's an exceptionally rare event). We should hope Gmail fails *a lot*, so that its reliability will increase! Uh... yeah.
If no one sees a pro-Google bias here, they must be drowning in the koolaid. |
| #2 By 2960 (72.196.201.130) at 9/25/2009 8:00:13 AM |
| If this concept is valid, Microsoft is a freakin' Genius :) |
| #3 By 23275 (68.117.163.128) at 9/25/2009 8:29:45 AM |
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keg-o-koolaid.... lord of mercy - 18 outages of various types in a year? Yikes!
I'd have been fired by my customers and tanked years ago with such a record. And business leaders give a rip about others' email - so the argument about size and scale is moot. I can imagine what any one of them would say: "I don't give a **** about how many others are down, I care about MY email being down!" |
| #4 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 9/25/2009 9:28:35 AM |
| #3: If only you were so outspoken when MS Live goes down, which it does several times per year for the past couple of years. Strangely, you're never critical of MS when it happens to them like you're doing here with Google. I believe that both Google and MS have some pretty smart people on the engineering side, both are dealing with cutting-edge technology and services, and if neither of them can avoid downtime then it just isn't possible at this point in time. My cable company has been around for a couple of decades and they still have outages every year. It happens. |
| #5 By 28801 (65.90.202.10) at 9/25/2009 9:43:03 AM |
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#4: You beat me to the cable reference.
To Lloyd's point, there is a lot more forgiveness when your personal email is unavailable. If you run a company relying on GMAIL for communication and business applications then frequent failures are unacceptable. |
| #6 By 37 (192.251.125.85) at 9/25/2009 10:01:22 AM |
| Gmail is up more than it's down. The opposite can be said for Microsoft's Windows Live crapola. |
| #7 By 116 (24.155.16.228) at 9/25/2009 10:45:46 AM |
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"Gmail is up more than it's down"
Wow i should hope so! We are on Microsoft's new hosted exchange service and have not had one blip of downtime. Plus its exchange which dominates Gmail. I guess you get what you pay for right? |
| #8 By 7754 (206.169.247.2) at 9/25/2009 11:14:43 AM |
| It would be interesting to have a tracking site (if there isn't one already... I mean beyond like a simple Netcraft-style one) monitoring the various SaaS providers and their uptimes/outages. Personally, Hotmail has been very reliable for me (using Windows Live Mail--love the photo features, incidentally!--as a client), though I know they've had a handful of outages this year also. It's just interesting to note the difference in the attitude towards Gmail outages vs. Hotmail outages. I don't recall any articles talking about how happy we should be when Hotmail fails! |
| #9 By 23275 (68.117.163.128) at 9/25/2009 11:42:09 AM |
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No one is using Windows Live, or Hotmail as an example.
I am speaking of our own and others' Exchanges - services and localized installs. Even in the event of a catastrophic failure, I can, in seconds, and I do mean seconds, flip a dial-tone database and have users back up - before they notice. Similarly, and as part of capacity planning, which is really more important here, I plan, very carefully for each customer. For example, I create an entirely unique storeage group and within it, create several mail stores. I distribute users across these carefully - taking care to stagger business leaders and key staff so not all key players or even all team members are on any one team. If a store wobbles, which it should not, but can, the entire company is never down and not even an entire team. Still more, localized caches insulate users as do many other measures - active maintenance, scheduled and planned maintenance windows - going back to my small, but many stores philosphy and design, keeping planned maintenance, which is scheduled around well understood operations, allows us to move through scheduled maintenance (twice yearly and after hours) veyr quickly and in small blocks impacting very small numbers of users. So give up, entirely and utterly, any counter arguments by hanging Live or Hotmail over my head - our FLD? Final Line Of Defense???? Off-site filters and relays that in a worse case scenario, allows all users, regardless of maintenance status, to access and process their mail objects - e.g., the federations of service many of you may have read my posts about - my cloud, your cloud, their cloud... it's all OUR cloud. And especially for Latch, yeah man... We are this good and where I know it for a fact, I'll say it just like that! I drilled it into my guys' heads from the day they started that they'd be able to "sing it" (know it so well it was like a song). So yeah, go at Gmail and Live all day, just understand there are a lot better and nearly unbreakable ways to get it done! |
| #10 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 9/25/2009 12:33:33 PM |
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#9: I am speaking of our own and others' Exchanges - services and localized installs.
Oh? I must be mistaken then. I thought you were talking about Google and how inexcusable it was for them to be down as much as they are. So give up, entirely and utterly, any counter arguments by hanging Live or Hotmail over my head I'm not hanging anything over your head. I was just making an observation about how you seem eager to speak up about issues that plague Google but are silent when the very same issues plague Microsoft. And especially for Latch, yeah man... We are this good and where I know it for a fact, I'll say it just like that! I drilled it into my guys' heads from the day they started that they'd be able to "sing it" (know it so well it was like a song). So yeah, go at Gmail and Live all day, just understand there are a lot better and nearly unbreakable ways to get it done! I'm surprised that NASA hasn't called to have you plan and implement the Mars mission. When you can host a service as massive and distributed as Gmail or Hotmail without any downtime, I'll be first in line to give you a cookie. |
| #11 By 2 (69.89.170.7) at 9/25/2009 12:54:07 PM |
| One has to notice that ActiveWin is never down....and quite speedy. I give Lloyd +1 for that |
| #12 By 37 (192.251.125.85) at 9/25/2009 1:36:33 PM |
|
"#7 By RedAvenger (1147 Posts) at 9/25/2009 10:45:46 AM
"Gmail is up more than it's down" Wow i should hope so! We are on Microsoft's new hosted exchange service and have not had one blip of downtime. Plus its exchange which dominates Gmail. I guess you get what you pay for right?" Yup. I sure do. I get great service and great uptime with my google services that I use, and for free. LOVE IT. |
| #13 By 23275 (68.117.163.128) at 9/25/2009 1:37:09 PM |
|
Latch,
You have no idea of how big the projects we have built and hosted for, or I have built and coded for. I think some would impress even you. Regardless, I am talking about how ridiculous it is that Google's being given an auto-pass and excuses are made for it, but even that is not the point. Forget "massive" and forget it quick, because the future is not about massive like Gmail/Gape. It is about small that is appropriately and simultaneously big. You don't build strength, and agility by adding big to big. You add many small, fine layers that make up very dense and flexible things - like mucsle. I reason that the future for services+software is to be found in services that are delivered and controlled very close to end users and companies, that leverage an appropriate mix of software and services that are delivered from federated systems. I think that services like Google's and Hotmail are inappropriate for businesses users - UNLESS they too are members of an accessible via such federations, or unless requirements are low enough where periodic outages are ok. The services we and other provide, reflect this method and design. |
| #14 By 7754 (206.169.247.2) at 9/25/2009 1:39:00 PM |
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#10: I was just making an observation about how you seem eager to speak up about issues that plague Google but are silent when the very same issues plague Microsoft.
You're never one eager to point out Microsoft's issues, of course. :P You may point out others as well, but only to join in on the discussion, not start it (at least from what I've seen here). |
| #15 By 15406 (216.191.227.68) at 9/25/2009 2:27:08 PM |
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#13: I'm sure you have done some large projects, but I am confident that they are nothing near the scale of a Gmail or Hotmail.
#14: This forum is mostly about Microsoft & Windows. If there was a story on AW about Intel's anti-competitive abuse in Europe, I'd be on that. Typically, I won't comment if I have no interest in the story, but I will sometimes if others are commenting to keep the conversation flowing. While no corporation is perfect, I generally don't have a lot to complain about with Google. I recognize that Microsoft supporters must make the most of any Google issue so as to have it appear that they are just like MS, or that MS isn't as bad as they appear by comparison. This is nonsense, of course, like comparing a single misdemeanor to a long history of felonies. |
| #16 By 7754 (206.169.247.2) at 9/25/2009 3:51:13 PM |
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#15: from an outside perspective, if it's a Microsoft flaw, you're on top of it here immediately. You say that you are equally critical of other companies when they mess up. I really don't see that--at least not here. Calling Lloyd out for that... well... I'm just saying the same is true for you, from what I've seen.
As for this discussion about Gmail's as opposed to its Microsoft counterpart (Hotmail), I really don't see this as "a single misdemeanor" vs. "a long history of felonies." |
| #17 By 143 (216.205.223.146) at 9/25/2009 4:27:59 PM |
| I like gmail. At least it doesn't look like a las vegas slot machine like yahoo mail. |
| #18 By 15406 (99.240.76.72) at 9/25/2009 4:49:00 PM |
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#16: You say that you are equally critical of other companies when they mess up. I really don't see that--at least not here.
Because here you see primarily Microsoft/Windows stories, like I said in #15. Sometimes Apple is mentioned, and I usually don't care enough about Apple to read the thing or respond if I do read it. Google has't done anything to upset me (yet... give them time). As for this discussion about Gmail's as opposed to its Microsoft counterpart (Hotmail), I really don't see this as "a single misdemeanor" vs. "a long history of felonies." I was talking in the context of Google versus Microsoft, not Gmail versus Hotmail. |
| #19 By 7754 (206.169.247.2) at 9/25/2009 5:50:12 PM |
| #18: I don't think that's the issue. If this story were about a Hotmail outage and about how we should be glad that they have outages... I think it's a pretty safe bet that your response would be different. |
| #20 By 23275 (68.117.163.128) at 9/25/2009 6:10:13 PM |
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I think the issue is about systemic risk and whether businesses can take such risks when there are better and more flexible and resiliant options that offer more.
I think also that the traffic coming off of Gmail looks really awful - plain text all over the place and in times new romain with jacked up spacing. I've also seen business Gmail users (under their own domain names) send to all kinds of people they did not intend to. It's just nasty looking. When those users say it is cheap, I say, "Good, it looks it." Also, and I think this really matters a lot - forget outages for a sec and just think of users who need help. Say a new employee joins, or someone goes on sick leave and things need to be set up, or new people assisted. Say also that some new level of integration is explored - I dunno... some new form of efax a customer wants to integrate. When you're on Gmail who do you call and exactly how well do they know you and your needs? Do they know your business and how many faxes you're sending when bids are open and flying about by the hundreds? (just an example). Do they know when <name> will be back from bereivement leave and to whom and when to arrange to route traffic? No, Google is not going to know and if you can get anyone on the phone at all, how long is it going to take to get anything done? This is the sort of stuff we do all the time - respond immediately to needs we are well aware of, while leveraging a federation of systems. How about when things go bad with an employee and a small business owner needs real help - real fast - recovering what an employee has deleted. How many really urgent calls like that has Google taken to heart and done something about? I don't know that number, but I can assure you it never happens when it is a good time. What about a contacts list that an employee deleted from his Extranet and he needs it restored in minutes, before his team needs them? No, it is not as big as Gmail, or Hotmail, but it really big to each and every individual person that it serves. To each of them it is huge. This is the stuff that Gmail/Google may never get on their own. This is where local shops managing platforms matter. An outage at Google, or any other host should never really matter all that much - it should and can be planned for and it does not take a government sized corporation to do it. |
| #21 By 28801 (65.90.202.10) at 9/27/2009 6:10:05 PM |
| I'm thankful when my car doesn't start. That way I know when it need service. |
| #22 By 12071 (203.210.68.145) at 9/27/2009 7:19:19 PM |
| #21 That'll teach you for having a crap car that doesn't tell you when it needs to be serviced! |
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