Source URL: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/25/google_cloud_frankfurt_outage/
Source: The Register
Title: Google Cloud burst by 12-hour outage in Germany
Feedly Summary: Inconvenient power failure and cooling issue struck one zone, but the pain was widespread
Google Cloud apologized on Thursday after its europe-west3 region – located in Frankfurt, Germany – experienced an outage lasting half a day.…
AI Summary and Description: Yes
Summary: Google Cloud experienced a significant outage in its europe-west3 region due to a power failure and cooling issue, lasting over 12 hours and impacting numerous services, including Google Compute Engine and Vertex AI Batch Prediction. The incident highlights the vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructure and the potential implications for service reliability.
Detailed Description: The outage in the Google Cloud europe-west3 region underlines crucial aspects of infrastructure security and service reliability in cloud computing, particularly for organizations relying on cloud services for AI, data processing, and other enterprise functions. Key takeaways from the incident include:
– **Incident Duration**: The outage began at 02:30 local time on October 24 and lasted until 15:09, totaling 12 hours and 39 minutes.
– **Root Cause**: Identified as a power failure and cooling issue, leading to the shutdown of parts of one zone (europe-west3-c) which caused degraded service across several cloud services.
– **Affected Services**:
– Google Compute Engine: Users faced VM creation failures and delays in processing deletions.
– Google Kubernetes Engine: Nodes became inaccessible, impacting new VM attempts.
– Vertex AI Batch Prediction: Users encountered failures in infrastructure readiness for serving workloads.
– Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Dataproc also reported significant operational delays and failures.
– **Impact Level**: Impacted primarily at the zonal level, with minimal but notable regional effects on operations in the other zones.
– **Customer Communication**: Google notified users of the outage 26 minutes after it started and provided mitigative actions, including workload migration advice, after a delay of nearly three hours.
– **Historical Context**: The outage follows previous incidents, emphasizing persistent vulnerabilities and the need for robust disaster recovery and business continuity measures in cloud services.
This incident serves as a case study for security and compliance professionals, underscoring the importance of designing resilient cloud architectures, ensuring comprehensive incident response strategies, and implementing effective communication protocols with users during outages. Lessons learned can help organizations better prepare for potential disruptions in their cloud infrastructures.