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What went wrong with UniSuper and Google Cloud?

Over the past two weeks, UniSuper, an Australian superannuation fund, faced every cloud user’s nightmare: their cloud provider deleted their data. From May 2nd to 13th, UniSuper experienced a major outage and in several updates blamed Google Cloud for the incident. The disruption of UniSuper services was caused by a combination of rare issues at Google Cloud that resulted in an inadvertent misconfiguration during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud, which triggered a previously unknown software bug that impacted UniSuper’s systems.

Restoring UniSuper’s Private Cloud instance has called for an incredible amount of focus, effort, and partnership between our teams to enable an extensive recovery of all the core systems. Based on my experiences with Google Cloud’s professional services team, they, and presumably their partners, recommend Terraform for defining infrastructure as code. Given how little detail was communicated, it is difficult to make a conclusive statement about what happened, though I personally suspect UniSuper operator error was a large factor.

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