Posted by aarondf 3 hours ago
https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...
A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian
8 May 2024
UniSuper and Google Cloud understand the disruption to services experienced by members has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We extend our sincere apologies to all members.
While supporting UniSuper to bring its systems back online, Google Cloud has been conducting a root cause analysis.
Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events, where an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.
This is described as an isolated, “one-of-a-kind occurrence” that has never before occurred with any Google Cloud client globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the sequence of events and taken measures to ensure it does not happen again.
Why did the outage last so long?
UniSuper had duplication across two geographies as protection against outages and data loss. However, the deletion of the Private Cloud subscription triggered deletion across both geographies.
Restoring the Private Cloud required significant coordination and effort between UniSuper and Google Cloud, including recovery of hundreds of virtual machines, databases, and applications.
You see this at least once a year. Never heard of this from AWS or Azure.
In all seriousness, this is why we don't use them. They have the most ergonomic cloud of the big three, then absolutely murder it by having this kind of reputation.
Azure nerfed the front door of all Azure and O365 services last year.
All it these companies are great at what they and occasionally fuck up.
also, I can't help but imagine if instead of render, it was Apple's account which could've been auto-banned (Render is almost a billion dollar company or series-B, I am not sure)
I haven't read the articles and I admit that but can you please elaborate to me on why Apple uses GCP themselves for idrive, I would love to know the technical decisions behind it on a genuinely curious level.
From my (let's face it) limited understanding of GCP, it isn't particularly good or price performant and one of the wonders is that Google sells it directly with Google photos too and an competitive lineup at android.
So in some sense if Apple is using gcp's for icloud then aren't they just reselling google storage themselves and google can always beat them in pricing while also wanting to chew away at the percentage of iphones themselves too?
I mean, I can still try to understand the google search pays apple 10 billion dollars (right?) deal but I don't quite understand why apple would pick GCP when the hosting market is one of the more competitive ones with lots of companies.
I would love to get some explainations or theories as to why exactly is that the case
(Also given its HN, if anyone from apple is reading or knows the answer, I would love that too!)
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...
They had a really bad global outage a year ago. At least with AWS outages are contained to a single region.
It had lasting effects for us for a little over 3 hours.
AWS does it more efficiently; it takes down many startups at a time when us-east-1 goes down.
I know some workloads help to be colocated but all these places are connected by fiber and every cloud has a worldwide CDN it seems.
It's AWS and Azure that are the outliers and tend not to care too much what their customers do with their infrastructure. AWS is perfectly fine with allowing me to run copies of 15 year old vulnerable AMIs copied from AMIs they've long since deprecated and removed. Even for removed features like NAT AMIs.
The only anecdotal thing I've seen is we hired a vendor to do a pentest a few years ago, and they setup some stuff in an AWS account and that account got totally yeeted out of existence by AWS if memory serves.
Cuz otherwise you look like a threat actor.
That’s assuming your vendor was pentesting AWS systems. If you meant you hired a vendor to pentest your own systems on AWS, that’s of course a totally different matter.
Sorry for being unclear, the vendor was attacking our organization only, and any other company was expressly forbidden in the contract. As I recall it was a fake SSO sign-in page to collect credentials that they would try and social engineer our employees with.
They all introduce themselves, beg me to setup a meeting w/them and some sort of engineering resource(s), and they come to a meeting with a canned slide deck that is so absurdly unrelated to us that I just laugh, and then the next time I hear from them it's because we have a new AE.
This is my most recent reply (right after Next '26):
> I really appreciate you reaching out; however, we have met with, I dunno at this point, more than a dozen GCP Account reps, execs, technical teams, etc over the years and there's little to no value for us or you, now or in the future. Please do feel free to invest your time on your other clients. We're good; truly.
I love GCP and its services; we have been very pleased with it over the years, but the human side of it? Fucking sucks and I just don't see why they even bother.
It’s ok though, Claude helped us cut >45% of our monthly costs. I’m surprised they haven’t been beating down my door after we made that level-shift. Probably in AE transition. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I said this in the other thread, we got access to our account back, but even with a Account Rep. and a CSM on our account- it still took them a while to figure out what was going on.
I'm sure it could have been worse if we didn't have a rep on our account.
Implement anti-abuse measures and you will hit some loud false positives (this may be the case with GCP here).
I don't envy anybody running a hosting co - the internet is a really ugly place under the surface.
edit: to add - AWS are really good here. Must be the ~30 years of retail fraud and abuse experience.
> The fact of the matter is, you simply cannot build a cloud on someone else’s cloud.
Indeed…
In the cloud space it seems like AWS does nothing and wins.
Who deleted it?