Comment by shwetanshu21
6 hours ago
This should be a warning to anyone running GCP. They suspend accounts left right and centre without even thinking about what they're doing. It seems like they use Gemini 3.1 Pro to run their production decisions.
TK has a history of absolutely destroying the culture of the place like in OCI and has done something similar in GCP from what I've heard. GCP and Google are completely different entities with how they work. Don't expect Google quality from the name. It's just like those old brands which now have cheap licensed products like Nokia (An exaggeration I know but not far from truth).
Not only that they are known to shut off their services randomly giving you like 6 months to migrate. They have lots of engineers not doing anything, so they put them on migrating internal users off those services, most of their clients don't. There was a brilliant article on this by an ex-GCP employee that I can't find right now.
Avoid GCP like plague if you are serious about your business.
Edit: Gemini (unironically) found the article on this, a very good read: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
At least from the outside TK seems to be doing well given GCP's growth. My completely uninformed assessment is that he stepped in as the disciplined adult in the room to override Google's otherwise lackadaisical approach to enterprise. (Clearly still some ways to go, as this incident shows.) Now, that may have created a culture that is at odds with the rest of Google, but it was probably required to become a "serious" enterprise org.
That said, did OCI, being an Oracle division, have a culture worth destroying? On the other hand, I could see TK importing that culture into Google...
And this is Railway, a big enough name to top the HN main page and presumably find someone from Google to intervene at some point. I would have zero recourse if it was some little product that I built.
Their account was restored in 10 / 19 minutes! It just took 4-6 hours to get everything fully healthy. I look forward to seeing the google response to this hopefully.
May 19, 22:10 UTC - Our automated monitoring detected API health check failures and paged our on-calls, who started investigating the issue. May 19, 22:11 UTC - Dashboard returning 503 errors. Users unable to log in. May 19, 22:19 UTC - Root cause identified: Google Cloud Platform has suspended Railway's production account. May 19, 22:22 UTC - P0 ticket filed with Google Cloud. Railway's GCP account manager engaged directly. May 19, 22:29 UTC - Incident declared. May 19, 22:29 UTC - GCP account access restored. All compute instances remained stopped and persistent disks inaccessible.
100% agree, I've seen on Twitter and HN small players facing similar issues with no recourse and response from Google. I don't know what kind of place they are trying to build there.
They got TK to woo the enterprise customers who were forced to be hostage to OCI. But it seems they are still doing opposite of hostage here.
This is the bigger point of all of this. Scary.
> Don't expect Google quality from the name.
It sounds exactly like what I have experienced in terms of Google quality over the decades.
GCP was never known for their support and deprecation of services was always a huge risk. Its very sad because its actually a quality product. They should easily be the number 2 provider. Azure is extremely unreliable and their documentation is subpar. GCP being in 3rd place is more of their doing.
i wouldnt really call it a product without support, let alone a good product.
its a nicely design hobby, that somebody could make a good product out of, by following the same abstractions
All google products work like this. Should never be used for anything critical.
Yeah, sadly know that from being burned from one of their depreciations. In fact, 2-3. But you live and you learn. And it is better to learn from other's mistakes always.
> Don't expect Google quality
Google has an extremely poor reputation. Why are you thinking differently to that?
Hasn't theGoog acted this way of quick to suspend accounts well before Gemini? I like to bash on LLMs as much as the next guy, but this seems very much like the memory of a gold fish. Or, you are just too young to remember pre-LLMs???
Haha, no. I know Google bans anyone randomly with usually no recourse in sight. I just wanted to take a dig at how bad their LLM is too while we were at it and thinks like Google themselves which is not surprising.
They probably do use similar tech to make some of these decisions, though. And they always have done that as well.
You missed the humor part and focused on the tech part, it seems.
What/who is TK? What is OCI?
Thomas Kurian (GCP ceo)
OCI is oracle cloud infrastructure.
That Google poached from Oracle Cloud, fwiw.
This feels like google applying the same anti-spam mindset everywhere: detect risk, ban first, ask questions later.
That seems to be the case. But as we see it backfires. Railway is very public, but we know at hacker news google has been doing this kind of thing for quite some time now.
yep, last year they deleted UniSuper private cloud too
It's pretty stupid that big customers like Railway are not somehow protected from this.
I think all customers should be protected by at least one CSR doing a quick approve before banning the account.
> It seems like they use Gemini 3.1 Pro to run their production decisions.
They said they are already using Gemini 3.5 Pro internally.
Then it's a bad endorsement for Gemini 3.5 pro too. But jokes aside, I think they need a customer centric thinking instead of a self-centred one they seem to harbour even before TK joined (not everything can be blamed on him although it should be his responsibility now).
Google? Customer-centric? The closest thing to that is their cloud division buttering up some big name clients.
Other than that, Google prefers to act like "customers" are some kind of unfortunate rash they can't quite seem to get rid of, but would love to do so.
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