Google Glitch Rationalized
March 27, 2009
Google has become a chatty Cathy of late. An interesting and insightful l example is “How Google Routes Around Outages” here. Writing in Data Center Knowledge, Rich Miller’s summary of a conversation with Googler Urs Holzle provides some information about the recent Gmail outage. For me, the most interesting comment by Mr. Holzle was:
There are several different layers of “routing around” problems – a failing Google File System (GFS) chunkserver can be routed around by the GFS client automatically, whereas a datacenter power loss may require some manual intervention. In general, we try to develop scalable solutions and build in the “route around” behavior into our software for problems with a clear solution. When the interactions are more complex and require sequenced steps or repeated feedback loops, we often prefer to put a human hand on the wheel.
There are other interesting factoids in the write up. Useful information. However, Gmail went down. This is the issue, not what Google does to stay online.
Stephen Arnold, March 27, 2009
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