How Google Routes Around Outages

Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway, according Urs Holzle, who oversees the company’s massive data centre operations. Google updates its software and systems on an ongoing basis, usually without incident. But not always. On 24 February a bug in the software that manages the location of Google’s data triggered an outage in Gmail, the widely-used webmail component of Google Apps