The Gmail incident revelation: The massive cloud is not necessarily a good thing

Almost exactly a year ago, Rajen Sheth, Google Apps's senior product manager, is also trying to publicize the advantages of how well and the scale-economy effect Google's new set of disaster-recovery infrastructures can offer. Sheth on Google's corporate blog boasted that Google is taking synchronous replication technology to replicate data to multiple data centers, which is too expensive for ordinary companies, but for Google, the company has a huge size. So that's why it's safer for users to choose Google than to host e-mail systems.

Look what happened. A flaw in Google's storage update software destroyed all of the synchronized data files stored in multiple processing centers, and the company was forced to go back and take out the tapes to find data for around 40,000 users. This job sounds a little difficult. Otherwise, four days after the outage, Google has not recovered most of its customers ' data until today. Thanks to the dusty traditional media: tape.

This begs the question: is the scale-economy effect of the cloud really good? When you have 1.5 million users, can you protect them all and restore their data? Even an incremental backup can bring a huge amount of data.

Objectively speaking, Google has been doing quite well in communicating with customers, and the recovery process seems to be progressing well. In other words, Google has basically done what everyone expected. Claude Baudoin, Senior Advisor to Cutter Consortium, an IT research and analysis firm, said: "We should not accuse the entire cloud model because the probability of occurrence is limited." In fact, according to Google, Gmail's uptime in 2010 was almost four 9:99.984%.

The problem is that a small incident can affect a very large number of users when it is operating on a scale such as Gmail. Cloud computing (in fact, a public computing makeover) has given the big cloud providers the same position as the Comcast, the US's largest cable provider, or the gas power company closest to your home. Search the TV channel, if there is no good show, it will be a bit disappointing at most, but if your broadband connection is interrupted, or the other person tells you that your email account does not exist, it is completely different.

Google is a popular brand, and such outage events are inevitable. How long does it take to make sure that the service works? The same problem is worth thinking about every company that wants to do well in cloud computing.