[xyst]

You would think that the company that literally wrote the book on “Site Reliability Engineering” would actually follow their own recommendations.

[londons_explore]

Googles advice is not to rely on uptime in every region.

Instead aim for uptime in a few regions, and load balance your users to regions that are healthy.

That design is far cheaper for both google and for you - and, in the typical case, users still get nice low latency to a local datacenter, and only in the rare failure case might they have to wait for latency to some other region.

[kevincox]

They do internally. But when customers want 3 zones in Indonesia they cut corners.

[ddol]

Do Google host their own products on Google Cloud, or are there different sets of data centres for Search/Drive/Gmail vs Google Cloud Customers?

[jeffbee]

This is a leased facility, the kind of place Google rents for cloud customers but doesn't need for itself. Google's own datacenters are https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/

[packetslave]

Other way around. Google Cloud runs on the same underlying datacenter, compute, and network infrastructure that Search/Drive/Gmail does.

[edit: at least in regions where Google HAS its own datacenters, e.g. "us-central-1? yes. europe-west9? maybe not"].

That does not imply that Search / Drive / Gmail runs on top of Google Cloud.

[CydeWeys]

The recommendations are to run in multiple regions if you need this kind of redundancy. Run everything in a single region and you can be affected by an event like this.