[ashtonkem]

Sarcasm aside, at $COMPANY we have AWS reps integrated into our Slack, and they work hand in hand with our engineers quite often. Even for things as low down as “why is this query so slow on AuroraDB?” They even hop into war rooms for big events in case we need immediate assistance during high visibility outages.

It’s hard to overstate how important this level of close support is for an enterprise that is literally betting the farm on a cloud provider. The idea of counting on Google’s historical level of support is an absolute non-starter for us.

[0xEFF]

The role you describe is a technical account manager and Google has hired many. I’m a Google cloud partner and every project I’ve worked on has had multiple TAMS doing exactly what you describe, working hand in hand with customers, connecting the customer to product engineers, to support, navigating Black Friday and Christmas, etc...

[SteveNuts]

To me, Google has always felt like the Stack Overflow of enterprise companies. Our questions to Google have been met with "You're trying to do it this way, but what you really want to do is this". Or worse, they'll send us a link to a document which we've already read ourselves and then just go silent.

They've never tried to deeply understand our use cases or business at all. Hopefully they turn this around but IMO, Google is absolutely horrible at B2B, they're just not currently set up to do it correctly.

[0xEFF]

I had this experience too around 2015-2017, but I've noticed a big difference between 2018 and now. They've hired a large number of people whose job is primarily focused on understanding the customer's business and use case. Most of these people have empathy in my experience.

In the large enterprise migrations I've worked on the past 2 years, I haven't heard a Google employee or partner say, "you're doing it wrong." Sometimes there is a response along the lines of, "we don't recommend doing it that way for the following specific reasons. For your consideration, here are alternatives we recommend for your use case. We've filed your use case as a feature request with product."

Additionally, I've seen issues which block a migration to GCP get escalated and fixed quickly. Issues which in ~2015 might have garnered a, "you're doing it wrong" response.

I've noticed a real shift in attitude and execution. There is genuine empathy and an attempt to understand how enterprise customers run their workloads in the cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud.

[temp667]

A while back before AWS was so popular their support at lowest tier developer accounts was totally ridiculous. I'd messed something up, out of their scope to fix (they could have just said nothing wrong with X). Instead some AWS engineer with my permission jumped in and got application side to fix things up and walk me through the configs etc.

What!! So I paid $50 for one month for support, and got a full on support expert who'd bill (at least in my world) $250+/hr. Honestly, the support cost was maybe even LOWER, and I'd just signed up for support to submit my ticket.

Google does not care. You GSuite calendar is not accessible on google home devices etc etc despite TONS of requests from paying customers. That same calendar integrates easily with ALEXA from amazon. Huh? Someone is paying attention, and it's not google.

I do like project based permission / approach in GCP. I like a lot of other things there too. But I've had stuff running for years on AWS without issue - so the trust with AWS keeping things going mostly is there.

[spinningslate]

this exactly. Microsoft has known it for years: to be successful with enterprise accounts, people matter. Account managers, sales/support engineers, direct access to product teams (sometimes). I've never worked with Amazon/AWS but from what I've heard anecdotally, they are of the same mindset. (It would be consistent with Bezos' customer service mantra so perhaps unsurprising).

I know of only 2 colleagues who've looked at GCP. Both are medium-large financial institutions. Both said they had very little human-to-human contact with Google representatives. In one case they chose AWS instead; the other is still evaluating GCP.

It's interesting that other posts in the thread are complimentary about the quality of the GCP products. I can believe that; Google has built its fair share of impressive technology. But I see no evidence of an enterprise supplier I could trust: one that would be there to help out when the world went belly up. Given that, it doesn't matter how good their products are.

I'd actually like to see GCP being successful. As well as bringing some competition and diversity to the market, it would give Google a more honest and above-board revenue stream than ads. I don't see that happening though, at least not without a change in leadership.

[theshrike79]

Agree, we have an integrated AWS contact too and they're really invaluable for getting insight on what the actual limits are on their services.