
Official Google Blog: What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud - qhoxie
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-we-learned-from-1-million.html
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aneesh
> "Gmail is twice as reliable ... and higher reliability translates to higher
> employee productivity."

Actually, I bet the email outages are some of the most productive time in a
company :)

~~~
jodrellblank
Productivity is winding its way higher and higher up the meaningless words
list, soon to join "natural", "selected" and "actually".

In fact, I may propose a pseudo-Victorian movement for Natural Productivity.
Motto yet to be determined, actually, natch.

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dawie
Uptime is great. What about Trust though?

Can you trust a another company like Google or Amazon with your
personal/private data or your company or client's sensitive data?

~~~
paul
Can you trust whatever random IT guy you hire to manage your exchange server?

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durana
"Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which
we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates."

If you are just using error rates from the requests that make it to the
application then it seems this measure of reliability doesn't account for a
lot of infrastructure at Google (ie, load balancers, switches, etc). Service
interruptions and downtime with infrastructure like this should definitely be
accounted for by a measure of reliability for Gmail since the end-user needs
all of it to work to use the app.

One solution could be factoring in some sort of availability monitor at the
border of Google's networks that polls/uses the Gmail service like an end-
user.

