Rethinking Gmail: Reliability Matters

“Another Day, Another Outage

“This week, Gmail suffered yet another outage affecting an
unknown (outside of Google, at least) number of users. This is hot
on the heels of a massive outage that affected pretty much all
Gmail users — including those of us who pay Google for the
“Apps for your Domain” service.

“Having worked in a data center, I have some sympathy for a
company when there’s some downtime. Murphy’s Law can strike with a
vengance, and I’m convinced that there is no such thing as enough
redundancy to fully prevent service outages completely. What’s
important is that those outages are minimal, managed well, and
learned from.

“Google may well be learning from its outages, and it seems to
be managing them OK, but we’ve surpassed “minimal” at this point.
The previous outage affected the entire service. This time, at
least in my case, I was able to reach mail but unable to use my
contacts and Gtalk became extremely unreliable.

“Mail was available via IMAP and POP3, apparently, but isn’t the
whole point being able to reach the service via the Web and have
access to Gmail’s search capabilities? I’d be surprised if the
majority of users have a client configured to access Gmail through
IMAP or POP3.”

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