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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 02 2016, @06:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the data-is-safe-in-the-cloud... dept.

Google's Cloud has experienced a fifteen-hour hiccup, after some subscriptions to its "Cloud Pub/Sub ... were deleted unexpectedly approximately from Tuesday."

Cloud Pub/Sub is middleware that Google says "delivers low-latency, durable messaging that helps developers quickly integrate systems hosted on the Google Cloud Platform and externally."

Scratch the "durable" because on September 27th at 21:34 Pacific Time Google notified the world it had spotted deleted accounts and pledged to restore them.

By 15:26 on September 28th the company said "We have restored most of the missing Google Cloud Pub/Sub subscriptions for affected projects. We expect to restore the remaining missing subscriptions within one hour."

It took less than an hour for Google to advise customers they could "re-create missing subscriptions manually in order to make them available." Which isn't exactly how clouds are supposed to work!


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  • (Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday October 02 2016, @07:12AM

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Sunday October 02 2016, @07:12AM (#409006)

    deserve everything they get:

    1/ When you do your own IT, you can take care of things yourself as well or as badly as you want, and if you screw up, it's your own damn fault.

    2/ When you have an IT department, you can call the IT guys in a meeting room, demand explanations for the screwup, and fire them if it's not convincing.

    3/ With a "cloud provider", you get a weak apology, a pledge that they won't do it again, and the right to restore your data yourself - just as annoying as 1/, and without the added value of of 2/

    Screw the cloud.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 02 2016, @08:34AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday October 02 2016, @08:34AM (#409014) Journal

    This is about accounts getting deleted. That's something that simply shouldn't happen, and it's not directly related to your cloud. If your ISP deletes your account, having local IT won't prevent your service going offline (indeed, in that case, a cloud service would be unaffected).

    Do you have a bank account, and maybe a credit card? Because both are the money equivalent of the cloud. Imagine your bank would accidentally delete your account. You cannot even locally make backups of your money!

    Do you produce your electricity yourself? No? Now imagine your electricity company would cancel your account.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @09:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @09:14AM (#409017)

      Shitcoin will fix this! Mint, sorry, mine your own money! Blockchain to the fucking rescue!!

      Account at the electric company, who needs one? Just set up an illegal tap! Live off the grid while stealing from the grid!

      It's the perfect solutions!!!

    • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Sunday October 02 2016, @10:14PM

      by t-3 (4907) on Sunday October 02 2016, @10:14PM (#409166)

      If the bank deletes your account, they give you cash, aka local storage of money.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 05 2016, @01:11AM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @01:11AM (#410426) Journal

      This is about accounts getting deleted. That's something that simply shouldn't happen, and it's not directly related to your cloud. If your ISP deletes your account, having local IT won't prevent your service going offline (indeed, in that case, a cloud service would be unaffected).

      It's far worse than that though. If your ISP deletes your account, they can create a new one for you and there's no real problem. Same with your electric service. There's just not much *data* in those connections that could be lost. Maybe some static IP addresses for the ISP, but that's probably about it. A new account is generally just as good as the old one.

      But this is a data service, and Google seems to be telling people "we accidentally deleted a bunch of accounts, we don't have backups to restore from, you have to recreate all of your data from scratch now". If you had local IT, you would have someone responsible for making sure your important data was backed up. With a cloud provider, it's just gone.

      Do you have a bank account, and maybe a credit card? Because both are the money equivalent of the cloud. Imagine your bank would accidentally delete your account. You cannot even locally make backups of your money!

      That's a better example -- if your bank account is just deleted or the bank disappears, then the money is gone too. But that's why the money in my bank accounts is insured by the FDIC. Who insures my data stored on Google services?

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:34AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @06:34AM (#410514) Journal

        That's a better example -- if your bank account is just deleted or the bank disappears, then the money is gone too. But that's why the money in my bank accounts is insured by the FDIC. Who insures my data stored on Google services?

        You don't have a backup of your data? Well, then the blame's on you. Or on your IT department that failed to make backups.

        You cannot make a backup of your money. That's why you need insurance. But you can make a backup of your data. That's why you don't need data insurance.

        And no, I'm not a cloud fanboy. I can think of lots of reasons not to put critical stuff in the cloud. But those have all to do with data security, not with data safety.

        Yes, if you don't make backups of your data, you may lose it. But that is true regardless of whether you put your data on a local computer or in the cloud.

        Note also that it doesn't mean that Google doesn't have done something wrong. But that's a failure of Google, not a failure of the cloud as such. If your plumber fucks up your plumbing, you'll also not say "that's what you get for not doing the plumbing yourself." You'll say "maybe next time I should hire a different plumber."

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 05 2016, @07:55PM

          by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @07:55PM (#410791) Journal

          You don't have a backup of your data? Well, then the blame's on you. Or on your IT department that failed to make backups.

          "The Cloud" is often sold as a *replacement* for that local IT department that would be doing the backups though. Instead, you have to either hire people to do it locally and fairly trivially duplicate that work, or you hire a cloud provider to do it for you and then if you don't want to lose your data you've still gotta hire a local IT department to duplicate everything the cloud provider does anyway!

          Note also that it doesn't mean that Google doesn't have done something wrong. But that's a failure of Google, not a failure of the cloud as such. If your plumber fucks up your plumbing, you'll also not say "that's what you get for not doing the plumbing yourself." You'll say "maybe next time I should hire a different plumber."

          Well, you're absolutely correct that it's Google alone who screwed up here. But you'd certainly expect a company like Google to have a robust backup solution in place -- yet apparently they didn't. With a cloud provider, how do you know? You don't know what they're doing, so you don't know what might fail, so if your data is really critical you have to be ready to replace that provider at a moment's notice. Which negates many of the benefits of outsourcing it to someone else in the first place.

          Alternatively you could look for a cloud provider that will actually give you a written contract with specific requirements and penalties. Which is probably going to cost a hell of a lot more...