Extended Gmail Outage Frustrates Admins

CWmike writes "A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored. At about 5 p.m. US Eastern on Wednesday, Google announced that the company was aware of the problem preventing Gmail users from logging into their accounts and that it expected to fix it by 9 p.m. on Thursday. Google offered no explanation of the problem or why it would take it so long to solve the problem, a '502' error when trying to access Gmail. Google said the bug is affecting 'a small number of users,' but that is little comfort for Google Apps administrators. Admin Bill W. posted a desperate message on the forum Thursday morning, saying his company's CEO is steaming about being locked out of his e-mail account since around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. It's not the first Gmail outage. So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers? And a more immediate question: Why no Gears for offline Gmail access at very least, Google?"

The benefits of cloud computing

Someone else deals with all the problems, right?

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

Remember folks, it's still in beta!

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

That's no excuse. When I need a word processor, I need it NOW, not tomorrow. I do not want my software to be dependent upon anything except my Cl drive. No net connection required.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

Something tells me that an email system that only depends on your hard drive with no net connection wouldn't be very useful.

FWIW I don't seem to be having any problems getting gmail through my gmail-lite [sourceforge.net] install.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

What's a chlorine drive?

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

Google Apps is a hosted service sold to businesses, Google are meant to provide that redundancy, and in theory they should be in a much better position to provide it than most small to medium size companies' IT departments.

In practice they seem to be sucking a bit.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

As somebody who admins google apps in a business environment, I can say, that is not what they have to offer. What they have to offer is up-time that is better than what internal solutions could ever possibly offer at a price an internal solution could not pray to beat. Is it 100%? Is it free? Nope, but neither is the exchange server in the basement. Do I control my data? Nope, but realistically the alternative would be to contract my data storage out to somebody else anyway.

Bill W. is probably taking heat because he sold google apps to his superiors as having 100% uptime with no disadvantages, which of course it does not.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

I started out as a personal gmail user. I was very happy with it, even routing my work email through it, but when the question for our mid-sized business came up, "should we outsource our email to gmail?" I said no. I said let's do due diligence, there are other outsourced solutions, this is something we really ought to get right.

Our CEOs (we have two, yeah..) both tried it and liked it, so we went with it.

So I'm in the unique position of having argued to management that we shouldn't risk anything on Gmail, and us doing it anyway because management wanted it. And you know what? I was wrong. Gmail has been a great productivity booster for our business, it's saving us money on salaries, and the downtime is less than we experienced when we were half-assedly running it ourselves.

Plus, when shit does hit, I just smile, and nobody tries to blame me. :-) On the ~two occasions that we had any noticable gmail outage, our CEOs weren't the ones complaining. They have realized that email may be important, but we can still get work done while gmail is futzing around with it.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

because you don't have the same amount of control you feel like it is riskier. But it isn't

I have a real problem with "cloud computing" and the lack of control is just once piece. With google, there is no assurance that *my* problem is being worked on. *My* problem will get handled in the order in which it was reported. (if at all) To me, MY problem is the most important problem.

The problem with "cloud" computing, and probably the biggest IMHO, is the importance of "you" and your interests to the company providing your service. Suppose that you build your own business on a company providing virtual machine services. All is going well, you are profitable, and poof!! they decide to drop the service because it isn't profitable for them. What if they see what you are doing and say "hey, that's a great business idea, how does he do that, lets look at the code." and so on.

I could go on, but there is a lot to be said about "building" your own business, and my rule of thumb is: "Committing to a single vendor lock-in, in the long run, will always be worse than doing it yourself."

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

With google, there is no assurance that *my* problem is being worked on.

While that is true, it is also true of your electricity and net connection. And any other utilities feeding your building that are critical to your business.

For most businesses, losing email for a little while is nothing compared to a snow day. It just means more telephone calls. And probably more productivity :)

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

You are statically safer flying an airplane then driving

That's true, I always get shocked while riding in cars. Can't remember a time in a plane, though. Must be that the plane is off the "ground".

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

The problem I think isn't the fact that there is down time, the problem is that when you're performing internal maintenance, you can choose the best time to do it by coordinating with everyone else in the organisation. When downtime is imposed with little or no warning externally (or simply just goes down "for maintenance"), that's when the online model comes unstuck and people get frustrated.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

Honestly, I've maintained my own mail server for 5 years, and my company's corporate server for 2 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times either of them have failed in that period. When they did fail (because I was being irresponsible about configuration changes, or hardware failures, etc), there was pretty much no way I was going to be getting in bed before I got them back up.

Granted, I don't have millions of users and petabytes of email. But I also am not any kind of real system administrator, I don't have a massive redundant data storage facility, and neither do I have millions of dollars and endlessly brilliant engineers working at my beck and call.

Some GMail downtime is, of course, to be expected. But these kind of high-profile outages from Amazon and Google are truly shocking. I don't think it puts the nail in the coffin of SaaS by any means, but it does indicate a significant necessity of SLAs for paying customers.

I would desperately love to divest myself of the responsibility for these mail servers, but I want to know that I can trust GMail's response time during crisis as much as I can trust my own.

Outage Outrage

It's a risk you take any time you let someone else handle something for you.

Re:Outage Outrage

That's just it, google DOES charge for the hosted apps version of Gmail. See http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html [google.com] for more info.

Stallman is laughing

Is that the sound of cloud computing advocates crying, or the sound of Richard Stallman laughing?

Re:Stallman is laughing

Have you really looked at it? I mean actually go to the Google Apps page at looked at it, or did you just hit reply without knowing. Oh, who am I kidding, this is /. and I'm lucky you read any of my message.

Seriously, here's a link to the Google Apps business page [google.com]. Look around. This isn't free stuff. I'm not sure why you scoff at this and not other business webmail applications. There...do you see that...do you see how Gmail isn't always free?

My point remains...if they paid for it, Google owes them an explanation.

If you need something done right do it yourself!

You can't count on Google to run your IT...sorry buddy. Using Google may be cost effective, but the obvious trade off is that someone else is really doing your job, and if that person drops the ball, then you really screwed the pooch, at least that's what your boss will think.

Re:If you need something done right do it yourself

The thing is someone will always drop the ball. In this case, the CEO can't chew out the guy in IT who pooched the email server and is working frantically trying to get it back up and running because that guy works for a different company. Or do people honestly think that an internally-run email server never has problems?... Just because it's Google does not mean it's infallible.

These guys need a brain transplant...

"Admin Bill W. posted a desperate message on the forum Thursday morning, saying his company's CEO is steaming about being locked out of his e-mail account"

Run your own damned mail server if it's THAT IMPORTANT. Seriously, it's not hard to set one up, and you've obviously got the money to do it.

Once again, it's a case of rich people with more money than brains having the problems. Nothing important here, nothing of value lost.

it can go both ways

I've been at plenty of places that run their own mailservers where uptime is considerably worse than Gmail's, so it'd be an improvement to offload it. The biggest problem seems to be at medium-sized shops: big enough for there to be problems, but not so big that you have some sort of massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. The ideal of the cloud-computing style of outsourcing is that you'd outsource to someone who was big enough to have a massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. However Google seems not to have delivered on that ideal.

Re:These guys need a brain transplant...

Run your own damned mail server if it's THAT IMPORTANT. Seriously, it's not hard to set one up, and you've obviously got the money to do it.

Right. Because some nerdy 20-something admin with a copy of "Sendmail for Dummies" can do a much better job than all the engineers at Google.

This is a paid service offered by one of the largest and most knowledgeable technology companies around. They should be able to do a much better job than any internal IT department. There are arguments in favour of doing it yourself, but there are definitely arguments in favour of outsourcing to a competent provider, which Google should be.

This is a PR disaster for Google.

There is an SLA for paying customers

Quote from article: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers?

Paying customers of the apps Premium account level DO have a service level agreement.

Free customers do not however which is probably what they were trying to say.

Revised quote: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for free customers in addition to paying customers?

From the terms of service for Premier account edition:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html [google.com]

1.9. *Service Level Agreement*, or *SLA* means the Service Level Agreement located at the following URL: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/sla.html [google.com]

Downtime period is a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime

Service Credit is
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9
seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0
fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.

You must request your service credit. It is not automatic.

Google SLA

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html [google.com]

There you go, the SLA for Google Apps. It's listed at 99.9%

But... the remedies for them failing that suck, only up to 15 days worth of service per month will be credited.

Also, it costs $50 per user per year

Re:You get what you pay for!

Doesn't anyone RTFA?

Google Apps is a suite of hosted collaboration and communication software and services designed for workplace use. Its Premier edition costs US$50 per user per year and includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for the Gmail service.

In August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Webmail service but also paying Google Apps Premier customers. As a result, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and vowed to improve its problem-notification methods.

$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.