[specialk]

Two whole days of zero service. In this one moment I have lost all expectations of good service from Verizon's cloud.

It doesn't look like customers were given much warning either. This story was originally published on the 6th of Jan. Could you imagine trying to find alternate hosting setup by the weekend if you have any kind of availability expectations? It seems like madness to me. Even if you did move yourself to another host to cover this 48 hours of downtime how likely are you to move the majority of your business over to AWS, Google Cloud, Azure etc.

The lack of notice on this seems to be a bigger issue to me than the fact that Verizon is taking their whole cloud out of service for 48 straight hours.

[jccooper]

Two days? You practically have to move to a different host. And if I did that, I wouldn't bother moving back. If they have any customers left after this it'll be a miracle.

Then again, I don't know why you'd think Verizon was a good hosting provider in the first place.

[iancarroll]

At the start of Google Cloud they had planned outages lasting weeks. Now, you could (with a bit of hassle) move your instance to another region, but it was very annoying and off-putting.

[obstinate]

Really? Is there a link about this? I can't find anything.

[wmf]

http://blogs.gartner.com/lydia_leong/2013/11/14/google-compu...

This is a lesson about the difference between hosting your own apps and hosting customers. All internal Google apps are designed to survive failure of an entire datacenter, so it sounds like they reuse that mechanism for maintenance rather than the riskier practice of maintaining a datacenter while it's live.

Getting back to Verizon, I work in an "enterprise" and scheduled multi-day datacenter maintenance tends to happen about once a year. Many of Verizon's customers would probably have no problem taking down their infrastructure for a weekend, but they feel helpless when someone else does it to them.

[iancarroll]

I can't find a source, this is only what I remember. I was an early beta tester of GCE and I think these were scheduled shortly after public launch.

[obstinate]

According to the other person, it is that individual zones may be offline for a week. That makes sense. A whole cloud being offline for a week doesn't make sense, but yea, sometimes datacenters need new network fabrics.

[tootie]

If I was a hosting company and needed a 2 day outage, I'd probably just shut down my business and offer to cover some expenses for users to migrate whilst apologizing profusely.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Why would you ever have expectations of good service from anything Verizon.