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Outages Leave Google Apps Admins In the Hotseat
snydeq writes "This week's Google outages left several Google Apps admins in the lurch — and many of them are second-guessing their advocacy for making the switch to hosted apps, InfoWorld reports. The outages, which affected both Gmail and Apps, 'could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers,' according to the article. 'If we began to experience a similar outage more than about two or three business hours per quarter, we'd probably make Google Apps and Gmail a backup solution to a locally hosted mail system, if we used it at all,' said one Apps admin. 'And it would likely be years before we'd try a cloud-based collaborative system again from any vendor.' Coupled with recent Apple and Amazon cloud issues, these Google outages are being viewed by some as big wins for Microsoft."
When my boss tells me he wants 0 downtime (or even five-9 downtime), I show him a quote for the 7-figure cost of creating such a system.
Apparently Google is expected to hit that level of uptime all while charging either nothing for their standard edition or $50 per user per year for the premier.
I wonder how much downtime the companies that are using Google Apps would experience if they had to pay for their own redundancy?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Google Apps Premier is not free - it's 50$ per year per account.
I'm using it for my private mail. I like it. But i don't expect 100% uptime - especially for just 50Ã per year per account.
we only have one or two unexpected downtimes per year
What about your planned downtime? If you're running Windows, you're rebooting to install patches on a regular basis or you're running unpatched systems. What about software installs?
In the context of the article, do you think the users of Google Apps (or any users) would be happy with, "Oh, no you don't understand. This is PLANNED downtime. This doesn't affect you or our downtime numbers."
you can have 0 unexpected downtime with a single server, if you are lucky.
You can win the lottery too, if you are lucky. How many people win the lottery though?
I'm a big tall mofo.
Do you honestly believe that you or your employees are going to build a system with higher availability than Google? In the magical fantasy world we all wish we lived in, you may have the budget, skill, manpower, and infrastructure resources to do this. In the real world it is not even remotely possible. I know how much it sucks when your system is down and there's nothing you can do but wait on some status dashboard to from Red to Green. That said, we should recognize that while being frustrated at this lack of control is normal, that doesn't mean you actually could do it better. It's easy to say "this would have never happened if we were self-hosted" while never thinking about the bullets you dodged by running hosted applications.
That means you, as a single customer, are insignificant. And that shows daily when dealing with any large service provider.
The only thing that my service provider should care about is the availability of the platform. I am completely insignificant, but the only reason my hosted app would be down is if the platform is down, and that sure as hell is significant to them. The advantage of hosted applications and cloud computing is that no one needs to ever look at or touch my app, the platform is all that matters.
Because it's a refutation of Google's business model (cloud based, for want of a better way of phrasing it) compared to Microsoft's (locally based tech).
I remain sceptical, as it it would seem that Google would have to be less reliable than local kit in order to make it worth switching back, even before you take into account extra costs for doing it locally. (How much more do you want to spend to get an extra hour per quarter in reliability?)
Nevertheless, IANASA so I don't know the data behind this decision.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
There are only two IT solutions out there in the minds of too many people: Microsoft, and non-Microsoft.
To go with Microsoft is the easy, sure road. It is the standard. It is what is expected, what is known to be safe, what will always work. Any problems you encounter here are met with "well, computers always have problems don't they?"
To go with non-Microsoft is hard and uncertain. It is not expected, nor "the standard", and suspected to be extremely unsafe. The smallest problem will be countered with "you and your stupid ideas. Now go and call LocalRetailerInc for a certified Microsoft solution, and be glad I don't fire your ass over this fiasco!"
Google is not Microsoft, so according to the business logic described above, if it doesn't work the only possible alternative is to use Microsoft.
Two weeks ago a transformer blew out in the building I work in. First there was no power for 3 hours, then temporary power as a large generator was hooked up, but it was not big enough to run the AC, so we did no turn on the servers. It took another day to get a large enough generator (about the size of a tractor trailer). In total, our business was shut down completely for a day and a half due.
I don't think you can even get a SLA from the power company.
Google Apps went down for 3 hours.
Shit happens.
We ran into one of these "gotcha" features in hosted Gmail that's been giving me fits and it all started with a simple mistake. I misspelled a user name. You can change the spelling in the admin module, but it doesn't change the spelling in the contacts and the misspelling still showed up when she logged in. So I tried deleting the user name and recreating the account.
Big mistake.
When you delete a user name you can't recycle it for five days, which pushed us past our roll out date. Their crip work-around is creating a mailing list with that user name. But that has its own set of problems, especially when trying to migrate a large number of users. There's no support unless you get the premium edition. So now we're stuck in the position of paying for support on a service we're not certain will work for us. I'm not inclined to throw money at something to see if it will work when what we're already paying for is working.
Unfortunately, it was one of our key sales people who already had that account name on her business cards. Rolling without her is a non-starter.
It's frustrating because I'm the one who recommended Google and I feel really let down. It's a stupid problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Even if there's a good reason for it, there should be a giant warning banner with a flashing red neon border warning you that deleting a user results in a five day lock out. Actually, it's been more than five days and I still can't recreate the account.
This one niggling little incident is making me rethink hosted applications. So, yeah, it does sort of benefit MS. Not in our case, we're using hosted SendMail instead of Exchange, but if this type of "feature" deters other companies already using MS solutions, then yeah. Who wants to take a chance on looking bad? There will still be outages with any solution but no one gets fired for recommending MSFT. There's a certain period of time that users are looking for an excuse not to like a new service, just because it's different. If you can get past that time frame, then a small outage can be overlooked. But those first few months have to be smooth. Maybe not flawless, but close to it.
It would almost be better if the free version was a trial and corporate users could get support from day one. This is just maddening. Shape up, Google.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
In my company Google Apps is the most reliable thing we use. Microsoft products are my biggest headache. We have clients that need their work done and I don't have any more time to waste on these crappy machines. We will be switching to Apple for all mission-critical machines in the next three weeks.
If my MS computers could have only 3 hours of downtime a quarter I would be really happy. I used to work for an IT company and they primarily used MS servers for their clients. Big mistake. MS products are a nightmare. Their clients would have been happy with 3 hours of downtime instead of days and days down dealing with MS server issues. I would only avoid cloud computing if there were serious concerns with privacy or hacking.
I love being the asshole, but let's be honest here: how many in-house systems actually deliver better uptime than Google ?
Not that many. If they did, all us sysadmins would be out of a job. Apps are not perfect. The fact that you can pay Google a few pennies to manage your email, even with some downtime, makes it several orders of magnitude cheaper than an in-house solution for most people.
Give them a break, people can survive without email for a few hours.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Linux has been rock-solid from version 1. Version 3 isn't being planned yet.
The main complaint against Linux is that it requires someone who "knows what he is doing". If the same is required of Microsoft solutions, then why not just use Linux?