Re:Google Services Experiencing Disruptions
by ma2rten on Thursday September 24, 2020 @11:44PM
(#24586374)
Search ads require transactional writes. But actually, as far as I remember big outages at Google in the past have been things like "someone pushed the wrong router config" and not "our database got overloaded". Maybe search is just more conservative?
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Re:Google Services Experiencing Disruptions
by asdfasgasdgasdg on Thursday September 24, 2020 @11:48PM
(#24586392)
Search ads is a completely different system than search. They don't share tech stacks or reporting chains.
Re:Google Services Experiencing Disruptions
by btown on Friday September 25, 2020 @09:45AM
(#24589609)
Do ads truly require transactional writes though, rather than eventually consistent log-append writes?
Re:Google Services Experiencing Disruptions
by pradn on Friday September 25, 2020 @11:02AM
(#24590533)
I have the same question. I suppose ads billing might have transactional requirements, but that's separate from search itself.
Re:Google Services Experiencing Disruptions
by arcticfox on Friday September 25, 2020 @11:46AM
(#24591016)
I worked at Bing/Yahoo.
There are two mechanisms helping keep search up when considering ads:
-> Search engine pages can be served w/ no ads, or even no personalization if components are down or lagging
-> Ad logs can be lost if necessary, since we'd under-bill in that case, which would be our own problem. That happened a small handful of times while I was there.
The billing system is indeed transactional, but has less need for 100% up-time and 0 latency in comparison to search. Not nearly as big of a deal if there's an hour delay on billing ads as compared to search being down for an hour.