

Notify HN: There is currently an AppEngine outage - icey
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/browse_thread/thread/b4ed491a8b9ccce2

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mark_l_watson
I use AppEngine, Heroku, and Amazon AWS often - for me, the very rare outages
are just noise.

Seriously, sometimes (not often but it happens) my bank's web portal, my
health insurance's web portal, etc. are down -- not the end of the world, just
wait a while and try again.

Web portal outages are not life threatening. I am willing to trade very rare
outages for ease of use and inexpensive deployment platforms.

Q: how many people here have businesses where a few hours a month of your web
portal outages (if that) seriously affect your bottom line profitability?

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thetrumanshow
I have a little blogger gadget getting 2.5M impressions a day that runs on App
Engine. I don't particularly care if app engine is down for an hour or not.

I can't wait until the day (if ever) that I am making enough money on my web
services to actually be worried about these kinds of outages.

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icey
There is a little more information here:

<http://code.google.com/status/appengine>

[edit] It's back up now.

~~~
ashishbharthi
Just wondering how they are calculating

Current Availability 83.64%

~~~
pmjordan
My guess is Successful Response/Request ratio.

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andrewljohnson
This annoyed my users and annoyed me. I serve my website and the Help section
of my iPhone app from AppEngine.

It's also worth pointing out that the outage was preceded by horrible
performance issues, and I wonder why they didn't take a cue and prevent an all
out outage. This mailing list post doesn't even begin to explain what
happened, and that peeves me a bit too.

I felt like a stooge telling my users yesterday that this was AppEngine's
fault and I couldn't do anything about it. That's always a terrible thing to
have to say to a user. I'm thinking about moving this site to EC2 with my
other.

~~~
stonemetal
_I'm thinking about moving this site to EC2 with my other._ Is telling your
customer it is Amazon's fault somehow better than blaming Google?
[http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/10/04/on-our-extended-
downtim...](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/10/04/on-our-extended-downtime-
amazon-and-whats-coming/) Sure that was technically an EBS problem but still
the point stands nothing is perfect and as long as you don't own the internet
you rely on someone somewhere for something, it can break and the fault to lie
with someone else.

~~~
andrewljohnson
The only difference is my EC2 site has been running continuously without
supervision for months, and my AppEngine site often has glitches.

Nothing is perfect, but some things are better.

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smokey_the_bear
For hours yesterday the majority the hits to my app engine site were timing
out against the 30 second deadline exceeded error, usually while initializing
django and the logs said they'd received less than 500ms of cpu time. There
were other similar complaints on the message board. It took google a full day
to admit there was a problem. I love how easy the app engine is, but this does
make me think about migrating.

~~~
smokey_the_bear
Actually, I retract that. I just checked the app engine message board again
(my post had been delayed for moderation yesterday), and a google engineer
responded and offered to look into everyone's apps, and he'd resolved the
issue for the others.

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X-Istence
Seems like even their administrative panel is down, so I can't even log in...

<http://appengine.google.com/>

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waterlesscloud
I'd been considering using AppEngine for small project, but I'm not sure I can
rely on it for even that.

There were some issues following a 30 minute maintenance last week (which fell
during a USA early evening period as it was) that lasted for several hours,
and now this.

~~~
X-Istence
Give AppEngine a chance, you may like the way it works. Yes, the downtime
sucks, but Google will at least be fairly honest about the reasons which is
generally better than my previous host. Which got their machine owned, and my
PHP scripts backdoored and they said it was a simple hardware issue.

Overall I have been really impressed with Google AppEngine, it has served my
needs. I'm not happy about the downtime, but as a paying customer I'll just
email them and generally I'll end up getting credited for the downtime.

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Shamiq
Damn interns....

 __edit __: I've broken things massively as an intern...

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whyleyc
"We sincerely apologies for the inconvenience".

Sounds like AppEngine is being run by a bunch of Nigerian spammers.

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bradfordw
I for one, blame Python's GIL! _rolls eyes_

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sutro
Notify HN: I just finished my breakfast. It was Granola.

