Technology Fails. Get Over It.

September 24, 2009

In case you hadn’t heard, there was another Gmail outage today. Of course, the fact that most people who actually use the service were painfully aware of this still didn’t stop many tech blogs and news sites publishing posts to tell us anyway. What caught my eye was a post by the usually-pragmatic Om Malik, whose headline cried, “Why You Can’t Trust Google“,

For time and again, the company has proven that despite all its talk, its offerings are as unreliable as those of any other service provider.

I do sympathise with Om and everyone else who has put their trust in Google to run their email, but we need a reality check here. Just because Google has seemingly infinite resources, it doesn’t make them immune from the kind of challenges that face IT departments in companies, large and small, all over the world.

Anyone who’s provided, implemented or supported IT services for any length of time will tell you that, no matter what risk mitigation/platform resilience measures you put in place; no matter how well you test your changes ahead of implementation; no matter how thorough your change review process, every now and then the technology will fail, something will screw up and service outages will occur.

As Om himself offered in one of his previous posts, following the last Gmail outage:

1. Get used to outages. Why? Scale forces history to repeat. As the Internet matures, we expect it to operate more smoothly, so outages make it look like you’re falling behind. But outages can also be a sign of that very maturation. Companies will learn to avoid them, then as the whole thing scales up and grows more complex, it will happen again. There will always be outages, inside the cloud and out.

I couldn’t have put better myself.

Posted in applications, cloudcomputing, Google, productivity, tech