IT Professionals

Massive Google Outage

Posted by on May 14, 2009 | 6 Comments

Today was yet another reminder of just how flawed relying on Web applications exclusively actually is. While email can go down, as it did with Gmail for a short time today, having the same thing happen with Google Docs is a real problem when trying to appeal to the enterprise user.

Despite various efforts to make Google Apps available locally as well, at the end of the day, the applications are considered apps that are made available online. And when these apps go offline, it makes those in the enterprise sector seriously question the value of such applications.

But despite my own feelings on the matter, Google believes that Cloud Computing remains more dependable than what you might get from your own data center. While I do not pretend to speak for everyone, I do not run my own data center. Perhaps this is why I was using Google apps in the first place? So that I do not have to?

[rsslist:http://shop.tagjag.com/products/microsoft+office]

  • Pingback: Google rollercoaster « How I see the world

  • http://ictheworld.wordpress.com Hotrao

    Yesterday Google went down.

    And went down hardly.

    And it’s not the first time.

    But is really a tech failure or what is experiencing serious outage problems is a model: the model of web based and shared applications.

    During the years, we’ve been building an entire migration from local or client server based applications to “webbized” one.

    And of course this trend is accompanied and followed by a lot of money in terms of technology, investments and marketing.

    But this new paradigm in application deployment is eating up a lot of band and requires an infrastructure that is reliable, bullet-proof and available.

    Because the risk is to leave without vital (or not so vital) informations million of user.

    Google is at it’s 3rd or so, outage. And that means no informations, documents and applications for many more people than ever.

    This make me think if we didn’t run to much faster than technology and prudence counselled.

    As Matt Harley writes on Lockergnome, “Despite various efforts to make Google Apps available locally as well, at the end of the day, the applications are considered apps that are made available online. And when these apps go offline, it makes those in the enterprise sector seriously question the value of such application”. (full article at http://wp3.lockergnome.com/it/2009/05/14/massive-google-outage/)

    And that is the point. It’s not only Google apps, it’s the entire paradigm of web apps and informations that is now central for everyone, that needs to be supported by infrastructure.

    If infrastructure fails, there’s no reliability. And no reliability brings to drop of investments. And big looses.

    I think we put too much (and too early) confidence in web apps and everything that is “webbized” and over stressed the infrastructure needed to run and access all these informations.

    Which is the solution?

    One solution could be slowing down our webbization, but I think it’s not possible.

    The other solution is to invest more and more in infrastructure to enable more reliability. But is able to invest so much in this moment?

    Couldn’t be we will approach a big crackdown?

    I posted this on my blog at http://ictheworld.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/google-rollercoaster/

  • Carl

    I think that Hotrao has been overcome by the “executive cliche” and is incapable of delivering a cogent thought. He starts with the use of the adverb hardly instead the proper hard to describe the outage and concludes with “Couldn’t be we will approach a big crackdown?” instead of “could be we will approach a big crackdown?”

    The twaddle between is equally incomprehensible!
    Sad, sad,sad!!

  • Ralph

    Maybe English is not his first language – he made his point well enough. Cut the guy some slack and stop being so pompous.

  • http://jakewarner.com Jake Warner

    Perhaps this is a plan formed by Google in attempt to push the so called “Internet 2.0″ with tax and regulation?

    You never know anymore.

  • http://ictheworld.wordpress.com Hotrao

    Carl, Not everybody has english as first language.
    sad, sad, sad is the fact that you are not able to express some thought instead of criticizing people expressing their own.