The heat wave that hits Europe not only has an impact on the health of its inhabitants (if the appropriate measures are not taken, as the Romans did). It also puts at risk the technological infrastructure on which we work, entertain ourselves and communicate. In fact, both Google Cloud and Oracle have had to take drastic measures in the UK – including shutting down certain machines in your infrastructure – to prevent further damage to your cloud computing systems.
The measures taken by both Oracle and Google Cloud obviously caused the fall of certain services dependent on their infrastructures or performance worse than usual.
“Due to unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of the cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Center has experienced an issue,” Indian Oracle. “Some customers may not be able to access or use resources stored in the region’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”
The statement by Google Cloud has been the same. The company revealed that multiple products in its Cloud division were experiencing “high error rates, latencies or service unavailability” due to “a cooling failure in one of the buildings” that the company has in the United Kingdom to host the europe-west2 region. That is to say: the heat wave also caused their systems to collapse.
Neither Google nor Oracle probably foresaw a heat wave like this in the UK
These weeks UK is experiencing one of the most intense heat waves in its history. Thermometers located in some parts of the region have registeredfor the first time, more than 40 degrees Celsius, an unusual temperature in the Anglo-Saxon country.
The servers can work without problems if the ambient temperature exceeds 40 degrees Celsius. The best proof of this is Spain. In Madrid, where Google Cloud’s europe-southwest1 region is located, maximum temperatures of between 35 and 40 degrees are usually recorded during the summer months. The key in this case is implement a sufficiently effective and reliable cooling system enough to mitigate and withstand those high temperatures.
However, everything seems to indicate that both Google and Oracle they did not have cooling systems capable of containing the unusual temperatures that the UK is experiencing during this heat wave without failure. Logical, on the other hand, if one takes into account that the usual climate in the region is much colder.
For reference: the highest recorded temperature during the 2021 heat wave it was 32.2 degrees (at Heathrow, London). About eight degrees less than that recorded on this occasion. And, as can be seen in the portal data Weather Sparkonly on specific days was a maximum temperature higher than 25 degrees recorded.