On July 19, 2022, the United Kingdom and London experienced their biggest heat wave since weather records began. One of the direct consequences of this event was to cause Google Cloud and Oracle’s London data centers to go offline.
Indeed, to avoid permanent damage to hardware components – which would have caused a prolonged outage – both Google and Oracle were forced to shut down some cooling system equipment.
One of Oracle’s technical support managers summarized the situation as follows: “Due to unusual temperatures in the region, a subset of the cooling infrastructure in the southern UK data center experienced a problem. This led to a subset of our service infrastructure being powered down to prevent uncontrolled hardware failures.”
All services were back online within 12 to 20 hours, with no loss of information or performance
If one day you are confronted with the drop in performance or the inaccessibility of a website, instead of contacting your access provider, you can first consult this site, it will give you in real time the reports of connection incidents made by the Internet users (This is only valid for the most popular sites).
If you manage a website, you normally know the main regions and zones of origin (i.e. part of a continent or country) where your visitors come from.
With Google Cloud (other major cloud platforms also offer this service) you can choose the region and zone where your resources are hosted.
Choosing a region and a zone is important for two main reasons:
Spreading your resources over several zones and regions means that you are not dependent on a single storage zone in the event of an interruption. If a zone becomes unavailable, you can transfer traffic to another zone in the same region to keep your services running.
For example, if your region (well, the one where your service users come from) is Northern Europe and you want to avoid latency zones, you can choose a region or zone close to your service point. For example, if your customers are located in Germany, you can choose a primary zone in the same region (Western Europe) that is close by, or you can choose a region (other part of Europe) and a back-up zone that are also close by.
In the case of Germany, as you can see in the screenshot below, Google will suggest you to choose Belgium and Finland (if you give as much importance to three criteria: Latency, CO2 emission and price).
With the help of this tool you can choose the location of your cloud taking into account the consideration you give to these criteria.
Fast but Greta won’t like it
She won’t like it either
WTF ! 👀
Contact Done agency, we are Google Cloud Partner certified, we can manage from A to Z the migration of your cloud and ensure its management in the rules of art.
