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**Autumn Nash:** Justin...! \[laughter\] \[unintelligible 00:59:37.09\] |
**Justin Garrison:** \[unintelligible 00:59:38.17\] on that one. |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm both horrified and so proud of you at the same time. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[59:46\] So if you didn't hear -- from the time of recording this in mid May, there was an outage from a company called UniSuper, who is a really large... They have $135 million in their funds, basically, as a... What's it called? Pension. In a pension fund. So this company is -- |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm still stuck on the fact that your dad joke just went from dad joke to savage... I was not ready. |
**Justin Garrison:** You're stunned right now, I know. It was actually a good one. |
**Autumn Nash:** It was good. I was not ready at all. |
**Justin Garrison:** So in this case - so the account of UniSuper, they were running on GCP, and their whole account just got full on deleted. Gone. They just disappeared from GCP. |
**Autumn Nash:** This is wild. |
**Justin Garrison:** When you think of like disaster recovery, you don't think that like "My disaster is like my account no longer exists." |
**Autumn Nash:** That's what I'm saying, because usually your disaster recovery is just in a different -- but you still need to log in. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. \[unintelligible 01:00:45.15\] you have to be able to call someone, right? And in this case, they are a large company, or a large customer for GCP, and so they were able to at least escalate enough to say "WTF?! What's going on here? All of our stuff is gone." So the reason we wanted to talk ... |
**Autumn Nash:** But that's wild, because it's still -- let's say for a database, if you're gonna have a backup replica, it's still in the same account... Just, wow. And I can't imagine the amount of time it takes to set up a new account. Like, that is rough. |
**Justin Garrison:** From scratch. You're talking about like TerraForm or something like "No, no, no." You're not going from scratch to like "We are now back in business." |
**Autumn Nash:** That's what I'm saying. Like, what you're maintaining to even like scale is still very different than what you start from scratch. If you've got a bunch of nodes and you're putting up another one, and you've automated that, that is still very different than starting the process completely over again. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** Part of me has empathy as an engineer, that I'm like man, can you imagine getting the phone call and being like "Oh, crap. We just deleted everybody's stuff." |
**Justin Garrison:** You go and you log in, and you're like "I don't see it. It's gone." |
**Autumn Nash:** I have so much empathy for the fact that in software sometimes just things happen that are unintended... But also, like "Yo, you deleted all of it? Just wow..." |
**Justin Garrison:** And kudos for Google in this post mortem for owning it. |
**Autumn Nash:** They owned it. And it's a very good write-up. |
**Justin Garrison:** It was their problem, and the basics of it were UniSuper was using VMware on top of GCP. So they have Google Cloud, VMware Engine, and maybe it was just they were trying to get off Broadcom's VMware. |
**Autumn Nash:** I also thought that was very interesting because of all that's going on in -- so you've got \[unintelligible 01:02:32.28\] trying to get off of it? |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah, I mean, this is one way... |
**Autumn Nash:** I was trying to do a lot of research, trying to figure out "This is just something that works with VMware? Does this help you get off of it completely?" It seems like it would be an easier way to get off, but it doesn't seem like they're completely, you know... |
**Justin Garrison:** You don't want to get off VMware this way, let's just put it that way. And this is something that a lot of cloud providers - AWS, GCP, I think Azure might have one, but they have like a hosted VMware, which was a way to like take your VMware in your data center and say "Oh, I just want the VM to go... |
**Autumn Nash:** I wonder if this still requires licensing though, because for you to be able to -- |
**Justin Garrison:** Yes. |
**Autumn Nash:** ...no one's gonna let you say their name and not get a cut. So they're paying VMware somewhere. But I wonder if this enables you to then cut your ties with VMware at some point. |
**Justin Garrison:** No, because it's still licensed through -- that usually gets forwarded on to the customer, of like "Here you go. This is your VMware licensing portion, and here's your cloud portion." So it's divvied up as like a partner, but it's not like a fully abstracted away thing. |
\[01:03:36.16\] UniSuper had their VMs all running, as far as I can tell, on -- or at least everything that got deleted was running on top of VMware inside of GCP. And the specific thing they point out in the post mortem is that they had a private cloud, a private connection, which the GCVE service did not allow you to... |
**Autumn Nash:** Which I feel like happens a lot, because people will be like "I don't need this." |
**Justin Garrison:** You should have some defaults. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. |
**Justin Garrison:** But the problem was they're saying default was one year. And so they hint at that in this post mortem, where it's like "One year ago we ran this internal tool", created their cloud, they moved everything onto it... And a one-year migration is pretty fast, actually. For a large company on VMware, a ... |
**Autumn Nash:** Well, and because there's no customer intervention that asked them to delete it, they didn't get an email to notify them of deletion... Which is wild. Like, how are we deleting things without the "Are you sure? Are you sure-sure?" There should always be like three "Are you sure you want to delete every... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah, the side channel of like "Oh, an internal person made this with an internal tool, so no customers were involved." It's like "But actually, this was for our customer." |
**Autumn Nash:** Even internally though... Like, people switch teams, things start running in the background and you forget about it... We should still be notifying people, "Hey, are you sure you want to delete this?" |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. And this is one of those things where you look at something like a root cause, or some initial point like "Where did this fail?" It's like "Well, things don't fail in a certain point, but you could trace it back to this one command." But the assumptions around that and how that actually faile... |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah. This is one of those things where it should not be fault. It should just be "How do we make sure we never do this again?" |
**Justin Garrison:** And that's exactly what Google calls out in this post mortem, is like "This was one customer, in one environment. We went through and looked for anyone else that had these defaults, anyone else that used this internal tool..." Because now the hosted service, the customer-facing service allows you t... |
**Autumn Nash:** Petty... Petty... You're gonna be on like three cloud companies' hitlist. |
**Justin Garrison:** I will poke at all of them to make sure that it's better for other people. And we keep -- I mean, there's a whole site killed by Google. Come on. That's not me. I am not the person. You've never been on KilledByGoogle? |
**Autumn Nash:** No... |
**Justin Garrison:** KilledByGoogle.com. |
**Autumn Nash:** Can we just talk about why I love this friendship? You're just randomly sending me links and I'm like "Where did you find it?!" |
**Justin Garrison:** KilledByGoogle.com has more deprecated projects from Google than Amazon Web Services has services. |
**Autumn Nash:** Dang... |
**Justin Garrison:** I just opened it up. According to their thing right now there's 295 services that have been killed by Google. |
**Autumn Nash:** It's so sad, because it's like the running joke that people just create like random ass services to get like promotions at Google, and then they let them die later, and I'm just like... |
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