[laurencei]

As someone who works for Government and Enterprise - all I care about sometimes is how a company behaves when everything goes wrong.

The issue with outages for the Government organizations I have dealt with is rarely the outage itself - but strong communication about what is occurring and realistic approximate ETAs, or options around mitigation.

Being able to tell the Directors/Senior managers that issues have been "escalated" and providing regular updates are critical.

If all I could say was a "support ticket" was logged, and we are waiting on a reply (hours later) - I guarantee the conversation after the outage is going to be about moving to another solution provider with strong SLAs.

[totallyashill]

Very similar thing at our office. Considering the scale of which we run things, any outage could be a potential loss of millions _every minute_.

Sure, we use support tickets with vendors for small things. Console button bugging out, etc. But for large incidents, every vendor has a representative within an hour driving distance and will be called into a room with our engineers to fix the problem. This kind of outage, with zero communication, means the dropping of a contract.

Communication is critical for trust, especially if we're running a business off it.

[y4mi]

Going single cloud on that scale is simply irresponsible though.

You need failovers to different providers and hopefully also have your hardware for general workloads

And suddenly the CEO doesn't care anymore if one of your potential failovers is behaving flaky in specific circumstances

Not saying it's good as it is.. communication as a saas provider is - as you said- one is the most important things... But this specific issue was not as bad as some people insinuate in this thread

[softawre]

Agree, if we are really talking about millions per minute (woah), then you can afford to failover to AWS.

[user5994461]

As a government or large enterprise, you should get a support contract with the provider and have a dedicated support to contact.

Don't get it wrong. AWS is the exact same thing as Google. All you will is log a ticket and receive an automated ack by the next day.

[Cort3z]

You are incorrect about aws. If your pay for business support, and something is happening to your production environment, they are on a call with you in less than an hour.

[user5994461]

How could I be incorrect when that's exactly what I said? You gotta pay for a support contract to have any meaningful support.

[Scriptor]

You also said that all you would get was an "automated ack". This seems to not be the case if aws provides an on-call support engineer.

[joshuamorton]

I think the point is that that only happens if you have a contract. With GCP you can also get an oncall support engineer if you're large enough.

[qbaqbaqba]

Use AWS and government "region".