I made a new cartoon thing for you to try
also, Google Cloud does something very good
Happy summer!
First up: In last week’s issue, I came after Google Cloud pretty hard for not posting a root-cause analysis of the mysterious outage that took down a large customer named UniSuper.
Credit to them, just a few days later they released a statement containing everything I called for and more:
They took full responsibility for the issue without making excuses (even though, given that VMware Engine was indeed involved, I guess they could have tried to blame Broadcom).
They provided a clear technical explanation of why the outage happened. That tricky word “subscription” that confused so many of us in the initial reporting about the issue? It’s referring to their provisioned VMware tenant, which was accidentally set to expire after one year.
They laid out in reasonable detail what steps they are taking to prevent this class of incident from occurring in future, and why it was a freak occurrence unlikely to happen again: this was a config mistake during a since-deprecated setup process involving a single resource, not reflective of an underlying issue with GCP’s technical stability. Customers and investors can breathe a huge sigh of relief.
We can nitpick about how it would have been nice to have this statement within days rather than weeks, but I was hard on GCP last week so I want to be equally generous to them here. However long it took to put together, this is an outstanding statement. It’s clearly worded, technically informative without overly exposing the customer, and appropriately reassuring without being glib. I’m impressed by the work of the comms team, the marketing team, and of course the engineering and support teams who put it together.
I hope this is a template for the kind of communication Google Cloud will have with its customers going forward.
Oops, all cartoons
I’ve gotten a little behind on sharing new cartoons with you - so here are several, as well as a small announcement you may find interesting.
I’m not sure we’ve ever talked in this newsletter about why I draw so many weird little cartoons and flowcharts. Originally I drew them with sharpie marker in my cubicle at Infor and scanned them using the office copier. Now I use an iPad, but they still help me to organize my own thoughts, like about the misaligned incentives of open source development:
Anyway, I have been drawing them for years and years, there are hundreds of them now covering all sorts of tech topics, and hardly a day goes by that I don’t get requests for permission to use them in slide decks and LinkedIn posts and conference talks and O’Reilly books and on and on and on.
I’ve always been happy to give permission for folks to use the cartoons on a one-off basis, but a couple of additional needs have come up lately:
Increasingly, the marketing teams at tech companies want commercially-licensed, high-res versions of the cartoons that they can use in their own decks and posts &c
The cartoons do sometimes get out of date, and so I need a canonical place to post and let people know about updated versions
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet in this newsletter, but to keep up with these needs I recently added a subscription option to the Good Tech Things site. For $5 per month, you get full access to download royalty-free, up-to-date versions of the full cartoon archive that you can use however and wherever you want. You’ll also be the first to know via email whenever a new one is published. Early responses from both individuals and marketing teams have been very positive, so I’m letting y’all know about it in case it’s helpful to you as well.
One other question I hear every so often is “Are you going to open up a paid subscription option for your newsletter? Because I’d be happy to kick you a few dollars.” I’ve resisted doing that because I really want to reach as many people as possible with what I write, and putting it behind a paywall just feels kind of anti-internet to me. BUT - if you are one of those people, and would like to support Good Tech Things, a GT2 Pro subscription is the best way to go. And I hope you’ll find it useful in growing your own audience as well.
