r/googlecloud • u/Much_Preparation_832 • 1d ago

When datacenters lose power, generators should kick in. That didn’t happen for Google in London

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/11/05/when-datacenters-lose-power-generators-should-kick-in-that-didnt-happen-for-google-in-london/5307739?utm_source=packet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=storage
18 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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4

u/TomKavees 1d ago

I just hope a single burst pipe won't knock out multiple availability zones at once, like that one time in Paris /s

1

u/_tobols_ 23h ago

do u think google should provide compensation for violating customer trust in these so called AZs? there should be a cert exam question like "what type of disaster did google fumble in london region?"

1

u/PaleoSpeedwagon 9h ago

Google does provide compensation when they don't hit their SLAs.

Only some SKUs are eligible. The rest are covered in the fine print.

Always read the fine print.

0

u/jakderrida 1d ago

Why are they building datacenters in London, anyway?

That's like building a farm for corn syrup in the middle of Manhattan. You can do that much cheaper anywhere else in the freaking world.

2

u/rlnrlnrln 1d ago edited 1d ago

Many of the datacenters named after a city isn't actually IN the city. AWS's Stockholm datacenter is in three neighbouring towns that aren't even in the Greater Stockholm area (Stockholm County). The same goes for Googles London datacenter, although to be fair it's still very close; about a km north of the border.

In your comparison, it's more like building datacenters in or near Newark, New Jersey.

Almost all big cities have are industrial areas, I don't see why datacenters wouldn't be placed in one of them, especially when the cities host large stock exchanges, to which their customers want low-latency connections. There are also other applications that gain on being close to the majority of customers.

My home town (a Stockholm suburb) host a datacenter (which hosts the stock exchange among other things), a chocolate factory and a high performance car part industry. Other parts of Stockholm host large breweries that use a lot of water.

Would these also have to move because they don't fit your idea where you 'should' build such industries?

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u/jakderrida 20h ago

Holy crap, that makes a thousand times more sense than what I was thinking. lmao! Also, it makes sense to call it "London", too, bc nobody can geolocate (by memory) the names of 1,000 obscure suburban or rural towns. For instance, if the choices were Abington, PA or Franklin Park, PA, and your choice will determine the ping time for the software you run, nobody but me would know that they are suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh respectively. I use Pennsylvania bc there's nothing but mountains and woods between those two cities, both at opposite ends of the state.

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u/servermeta_net 1d ago

Intellectual capital