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Google discovers you assume clouds just work

Curtails warnings of live cloud VM migrations, which you mostly found confusing

Google's proved to itself that when users take workloads to the cloud they just assume cloud operators will be takin' care of business.

Last year, the cloud challenger announced it had introduced non-disruptive live migration of virtual machines, so that it could patch VMs without asking users to endure an interruption or restart.

A year on, the company has found that for most users even knowing about a live migration is TMI – too much information – so it's going to clam up. Google Cloud's practice of sending a 60-second warning about an imminent migration will therefore be discontinued. If you point your VM at Google's server metadata resources, you'll still get the warning. Otherwise you'll be assumed to be assuming that the Google cloud just keeps ticking over.

Google says “we learned that surfacing VM migrations as system events in our ZoneOperations list led to a lot of confusion for little incremental value, since the events were also logged, in greater detail, in Compute Engine’s Cloud Logs. In many cases, customers noticed an issue with their service, saw the migration system event in the ZoneOperations list, and spent a long time investigating that as the cause, only to find that it was a red herring.”

The exception to Google's new rules is VMs that are configured to terminate, rather than fail over. Owners of such VMs will get more detailed and earlier warnings. Another new tweak is the ability to query a cloud VM to learn if it is scheduled for maintenance, so that owners can test failover setup and capability.

Google's also decided the time is right to “use live migration for all instance virtualization software stack updates, replacing in-place upgrades.”

That users appear to be asking Google to be less prolix in description of its services' ins and outs suggests wide acceptance of the premise that clouds just work, except in exceptional circumstances. Google cloud users could be excused for thinking otherwise, given the Alphabet subsidiary's cloud has had so many wobbles and SNAFUs.

Whatever those foibles, Google's live migration tools, at least, are sufficiently robust that they appear to be inspiring confidence in users. ®

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