Google App Engine misfires
Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours Thursday morning.
Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle Thursday by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch. A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologized for the outage.
"Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem that caused the outage and service has now been restored to all applications. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site."
Google's cloud-computing service allows Web developers who can't afford to host their own applications a place to get their work online. Amazon Web Services does something similar.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
It wouldn't hurt if the author checked out the following page to get an idea of what Google App Engine is:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html
The unplanned shutdown appears to have affected everyone, those using free services as well as those who are billed for resources over the free quota limit (i.e., "paying customers").
When your computer is down you have control over the situation. When theirs is on the other hand you don't
If you are running your own show, you can decree things like hot or warm spares and enforce the two-person rule on all production system tasks. And when it all breaks, you can stand over someone's shoulder and ask "when is it going to be fixed?" and the poor slob who is sweating profusely can't say that they have other more important customers and they'll get back to you later.
Cloud computing operators really don't have any ownership of responsibility, unlike people on your payroll. And it really isn't limited to cloud computing. It covers fundamental Internet services like DNS.
If your mon and pop and need free email or remote hosting its great but otherwise...
- by gfsdfge July 3, 2009 5:53 AM PDT
- It seems none of the commenter?s are actual business owners. They seem to forget that payroll is far, far more expensive than the cloud will be. A whole lot riskier too. They will move to cloud computing or whatever the buzz word ends up being. This is just makes good economic/business sense. Most business folk feel their data is being held hostage by IT anyway. It doesn't matter if it's their own internal folks, or a local hosting facility, or in IBM's cloud. The business owner doesn't understand the difference and should not have to. They have a business to run. Most small banks have used hosted/shared mainframes for many many years without any difficulty. Look up Kirchman for example.
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- by cvaldes1831 July 3, 2009 10:25 AM PDT
- Cloud computing simply isn't ready for primetime. It's about ten years away from mainstream adoption. Oh yes, it's fine and dandy for pundits to discuss about right now (and the term "cloud" WILL go away), but for small-medium sized businesses, it's just another buzzword bingo square.
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