Google’s Site Reliability Team: Ask Them Anything!

The Google Site Reliability Team is currently taking questions over at Reddit. “We make Google’s websites work. Ask Us Anything!”  Participants include Site Reliability Engineers Kripa Krishnan, Cody Smith, Dave O’Connor and John Collins.

Among the questions: When was the last time Google’s main page was down? “Home page outages almost never affect all users simultaneously,” Smith writes. “There are many different systems involved in simply connecting users to Google, and most incidents happen outside of our network. We do occasionally have network outages, which are regional, e.g. a few states or countries. We also occasionally introduce language-specific bugs, e.g. garbling CJK. As far as I can recall, the last global outage was back in 2005.”

They’ll be wrapping up soon, but readers interested in wading through the AMA will find some interesting insights into how Google manages web reliability.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.