Ex-GCP here. Unless you shell out at least $15,000 / mo [1] for a Technical Account Manager (TAM) you are a nobody to Google Cloud. Hence all the bots suspending accounts and scripted processes. If you are a small business, bite the bullet and use AWS.
We have a TAM, but it doesn't buy us much. They use their TAMs as a sales lever to get you to use all of the vendor-lock in features. They'll help you architect your platform so that it won't run anywhere else and charge you for the privilege. You can keep telling them all you want about how you operate multi-cloud and how you won't budge on that and they'll just keep trying to run higher up your flag pole.
For actual issues needing real support, like when anything breaks, they're useless.
We have a TAM as well and they've not show any value. In fact, every issue we've had we've had to escalate through non traditional means (IE personal relationships). Google absolutely does not care.
We've ultimately decided that we're moving out of Google strictly to AZURE / AWS, and ironically enough Oracle.
The job title “account manager” says it all. That is a 100% sales role. So don’t expect deep technical expertise. Any assistance rendered will be to grow the vendor footprint.
That matches my experience actually having worked on the GCP support team. The TAMs just deferred anything technical to the support team... unnecessarily escalating things and being pushy even though we were already investigating the support request with highest priority.
AWS is run like a gigantic social experiment in "how half-assed and crusty can we make it and still have people pay?"
The reason we put up with them is because A. they're the new IBM, nobody gets fired for choosing AWS, B. you can reliably reach a human who will at least give you a straight answer when you start to suspect that the AI-powered auto-scaling is actually marketing fluff sprayed over a double/halve cron job that runs at the top of the hour.
>B. you can reliably reach a human who will at least give you a straight answer when you start to suspect that the AI-powered auto-scaling is actually marketing fluff sprayed over a double/halve cron job that runs at the top of the hour.
You say this as if it's an afterthought as opposed to an incredibly important and massive advantage AWS has over GCP.
^ My impression as well, after spending nearly $200K of my clients' money on AWS. I use GCP for my own work (+ a bunch of on-prem hardware) FWIW, but "the new IBM" phenomenon and "half assedness" is very real and palpable in the case of AWS.
Off-topic, but this might be a good opportunity to address this:
Do people find "?" as being aggressive? I think questions generally, tend to be aggressive (which is why deflecting back at your opponent is common in online arguments), and I'm having a hard time seeing how a question mark does more than just attempt to annoy the other person.
I'm curious what others think, I may be too sensitive.
Yep, that's how I intended it, effectively the same as "What?" with the implied offense level being no larger or smaller than the offense inherent in expressing surprise at someone else's opinion. That level is not zero, but it falls well within the bounds of civil discourse, especially given the lack of elaboration in the original position and the fact that I invested seventeen times its length on explaining my own -- only to not receive a followup from the original poster.
Well it usually has been when I've personally used it.
There is the disdain of not explaining exactly what you are questioning with the implicit assumption you are questioning everything said. It's pretty much a stand-in for "WTF are you on about? I don't even know how to ask a sensible question about what you said." when I've used it.
In this case though? It's a single statement so maybe a bit abrupt but I read it as a request for clarification. A fairly strong statement was made (essentially "don't use this company") with no backup or explanation. So an equal lack of effort was made proportionally in response.
This is great for AWS compared to GCP, but what about Azure? If anyone was "the new IBM" I would have expected it to be Microsoft (but I agree, it's not).
Only if you forget to factor potential support problems into your economic analysis. What would your systems being down for a week because Google capriciously shut you down cost you?
True, but due to the large extent of the services provided/required, it's very hard to know the unexpected costs, even if one has experience.
For example, one will hardly think of the cost of the disk speed (IOPS, in AWS), before moving to AWS. Then, they will suddenly have to deal with it (note that IOPS will be mostly opportunity costs, in case one doesn't choose provisioned IOPS of larger capacity).
The cheapest provider in existence runs on renewables (Hetzner Online). There isn't too much of a difference, especially for EU datacenters as they have a high excess of renewables and the energy market works in a way where you pay for renewables but just as everyone else you'll be using the base capacity generating dirty sources.
> One TAM unit provides on
average one business day’s
worth of effort per week
Just to have an ear on deck about Google's issues?
It sounds like the platform is bad enough that we're in the ballpark of Bald Tony the TAM coming in with a bat and saying "nice place ya got here in this rough neighborhood... pity if something bad happened to it!"
For actual issues needing real support, like when anything breaks, they're useless.