Gmail Outage Shows that the Cloud is Finite

Google has posted a semi-technical explanation of the 1 September 2009 Gmail outage on the Gmail blog. To sum it up, Google took some of the Gmail servers down for maintenance. Other servers that were supposed to handle the load became overloaded and shifted the load to other servers that couldn’t handle the load and so on. The snowball grew until there were no more servers to handle the load and most people could not get to their email.

This outage illustrates a very important point about cloud computing: the cloud is not infinite. We may be under the impression as consumers of cloud computing services that the “cloud” stretches as far as the Internet goes. In reality there are a finite number of servers that with improper configuration can still all go down. This outage shows that a cloud computing service is vulnerable to the same kinds of outages that a single server or cluster of servers is vulnerable to.

Gmail adds Forgotton Attachment Feature

How many times have you hit the email send button, only to realize seconds later that you forgot to attach an important file to the message?  I’ve done it too many times to count.  One of the interns on the Gmail team has come up with a feature that automatically detects if you have mentioned an attachment in the message, but not attached it.  A friendly warning asks if you mistakenly forgot the attachment.  That is a feature that should have been in every single mail program written since attachments first became available!