Comment by euph0ria
5 years ago
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.
I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one with just a credit card.
That’s the bar.
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> I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
That may be true, but many people won't even try it to find out because "Google" itself is synonymous with "customer service black hole". They should have given their cloud product a name other than "Google", similar to how Microsoft named their offering "Azure" and not "Microsoft Cloud" - if Microsoft (the name) has bad rep, they can just drop that moniker to preserve their cloud offering as simply "Azure".
Even if so, people will judge and measure by the long list of Google services cut-off just „because“ and sometimes on short notice.
Would I start any new business on GVP? Never, now, because I would be scared that they just change something that breaks my app because they can.
> We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
hold my datacenter
Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?
I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with AI making decisions. The reasons are good enough.
I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything up.
I'm the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform onto GCP.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
Have worked on a big, high impact Northern Europe GCP customer.
Support was hit and miss:
- once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems
- another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support technicians who must have been following a script similar to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts from early internet days. No clue whatsover.
- another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in next rollout. Didn't happen.
Google has humans, but not for humans.
GCP is the only Google service where I regularly, easily, got humans to take up my problem.
Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.
Well because otherwise they would never be able to compete with AWS. I hate Amazon, but AWS has the best customer support of any product I've ever used.
Why on earth would anyone want to rely on GCP if Google's executives have constantly been demonstrating that they do not give a shit?
Yes, it is the problem of Google executives, not of "Google". Fish rots from the head. Google has rotten upper management. That's why the middle management runs like drunk frat boys allowing for this kind of behavior downstream.
Human support for Google Cloud has been very good, even on a small account.
Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts... Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as such.
i suspect that google's cloud infrastructure's first customer is google themselves, and they don't care that nobody else is buying it.
Same here. We're only in the high six figures in annual spend, but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and exited the discussion within a day.
We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.
Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.
Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support including by phone in case you have login issues.
It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support starting from amazon.com till AWS.
This is a bizarrely biased view. There are no shortage of nightmare testimonials out there for Amazon customer service, unfairly banned accounts, and all of that.
Amazon might be slightly better than Google with regards to finding a person to speak with, but, not any better with finding a person who can do anything when you've been wronged.
That said, it seems that "Amazon" and "AWS" have entirely separately run customer service organizations. I have no reason to believe GCP customer relationships are managed in anyway resembling the way they manage their cattle on their free services where the user is the product anyway. Why would they?
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How much money should I waste into Google Cloud to have good support for my Google account ?
Not for everyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
From the comments:
> Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately
What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?
The answer is that you don't have it entirely dependent on your account. You have a business account with an account manager, and while any one dev who's linked to your account may get banned, your account shouldn't, or at the very least your account manager would be able to re-instate it because they know the relationship.