Promises operational change - and improvements to customer comms when it crashes

Google Cloud has explained the massive outage it created last week and, as has happened many times previously, admitted that it broke itself.

The outage struck last Thursday and meant that Google Cloud customers could not access their rented infrastructure for at least three hours. Among the customers impacted by the event was Cloudflare, whose services wobbled because of Google’s errors – meaning its customers also experienced disruptions.

We will improve our external communications so our customers get the information they need asap

Google’s explanation of the incident opens by informing readers that its APIs, and Google Cloud’s, are served through our Google API management and control planes.”

Those two planes are distributed regionally and “are responsible for ensuring each API request that comes in is authorized, has the policy and appropriate checks (like quota) to meet their endpoints.”

The core binary that is part of this policy ...