back to article Google Cloud blunder sinks Australian fund for a week

Australian superannuation fund UniSuper is lumbering back to life after an "unprecedented occurrence" at Google Cloud knocked its systems offline. The May 9 estimate for the restoration of "some" member services means that the platform will have been down for a week after a bug and a misconfiguration at Google's end took …

  1. UnknownUnknown

    I would like to say at my least it’s reassuringly cheap… but as now with a Big Cloud provider, unlikely.

  2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

    I dont understand why big corps like this fund, move to the cloud, except that they have no brains and just copy everyone else.

    Sad truth is they arent even saving any money or making things more reliable as this event shows.

    Pretty sure they were never down for MORE than a week when they were on prem....

    1. UnknownUnknown

      You would have thought a Lumbering Pension Fund would be immune to IT fads.

      Never mind, AI will fix all of their problems

    2. Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

      You actually can save money AND make it more reliable, if you know what you are doing.

      The issue is people move to the cloud WITHOUT knowing what they are doing or hire consultants who "think" they know what they are doing.

      1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        You could, but why bother to try ?

        Why gamble on something that 90% of the time is actually worse.

        At my job those idiots are constantly renaming things...or organising things in the cloud to "save" instances....

        Sure they save a few dollars amonth by decomissioning that cluster, but ar ethey really saving, when dozens of engineers waste days fixing this or that .

        Hundreds of dollars vs tens of thousands ?

    3. sketharaman

      Financial institutions are well known for being resistant to change and averse to taking on any risk that they can avoid. They have kept their gear onprem for decades. Now, if they're shifting to the cloud without any regulatory mandate and entirely out of free will and volition, it's probably because they're not too convinced about the stability of their sysems when their infra blokes make changes to code in production while under the influence at an Altrincham bar. (Real incident).

      1. Vulture@C64

        I don't think t's the stability of their infrastructure, or lack of it, it's the fact they've been able to stop funding it for years, saving millions by running kit that's gradually getting older and older, so at some point they have to decide to spend large capex, or move to the cloud with a small capex and ongoing opex, which might at first appear to save money to the untrained eye, but it inevitably costs more. When you refuse to replace kit and end up with an old system, you also inevitably loose key talent you had which is important to run infrastructure, people who understand the business as well as the kit.

    4. Flywheel

      You answered your own question

      > I dont understand why big corps like this fund, move to the cloud, except that they have no brains

      > and just copy everyone else.

      Precisely.

  3. CloudlessSkies
    FAIL

    Quick response times

    I am a member - they are a fairly good, cheap, popular superannuation company. Unfortunately the outage was more like 10 days (Mon until Thurs the following week).

    So why didn't they just restore the old environment and databases and have it up and running in a day or two?

    Even more amazing was that there was not even a whisper in the local media - smells suspiciously like a multi-party cover up to me. Major damage to several companies reputations?

    Full disclosure - I have never been a fan of 'in the cloud' anything.

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: Quick response times

      Its not as easy as restoring the old environment. For starters a lot could have changed between NOW and THEN...

      eg magic env vars, paths to files etc... most config is badly written and its never obvious a nd very easyto "miss" stuff.

      1. MatthewSt Silver badge

        Re: Quick response times

        Additionally, the backups were stored in the same account (even though they were in a different datacentre) so were also purged.

        Definitely an eye opener in terms of the "blast radius" for organising your resources.

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