Comment by amirhirsch
5 years ago
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.
5 years ago
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.
It's not the criticism being levelled here, that Google has no support.
I'd also say that it's not a particularly useful end of the market. If I were to judge a cloud provider purely on their "day 1" experience I'd just go to Digital Ocean, it's far better than AWS at that level.
And that absolutely works on GCP too. In similar way, even.
You just add "support contract" on that credit card (without it, AWS is just as likely to ignore you too)
2 replies →
> 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.