Google App Engine suffers outages

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started at 6:30 a.m. PDT and is still ongoing. During these outages, a significant percentage of requests resulted in errors. The errors are related to usage of the Datastore," the note said. "We're working hard to determine the cause of these outages and will continue updating as we make progress."

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the issue.

Update 5:25 p.m. PDT: Google fixed the problem, according to an update notice Google pointed out to me.

"At around 1:40 p.m. we were able to isolate the issue, and requests are currently serving normally," the update said. "This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries. We have isolated the bug and we're currently working on a fix. Going forward, we're also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won't affect the stability of the system as a whole."

(Via TechCrunch.)

[someguy999]

I wrote some rather unpopular comments about the value of relying on an external in-the-cloud engine for business needs in app engine came out. This along with amazon just continues to prove my point.

[rcrusoe]

Guess they should have started with in "preview release" mode first to work out the bugs. Oh wait, they did!

[friky00]

Yesterday I've published an article on how to use Google App Engine as a free CDN and we're suffering outages since then.

:(

http://www.ipsojobs.com/blog/2008/06/17/how-to-create-a-simple-but-powerful-cdn-with-google-app-engine-gae/

[tomnyc2000]

Considering the service is in alpha, the cost, and the ease of use I'd say it's going to be around for a while. Working with a friend of mine we put together http://www.modpoll.com, www.modpoll.com in a few weeks after going to the Google Hack-A-Thon in NYC.