[antonvs]

I haven't encountered that situation but we use GCP and use their support: https://cloud.google.com/support

We can easily get a Google person on the phone when we need to, so I wouldn't be terribly concerned about this scenario since we have a relationship, a contact route, and (possibly) some kind of contractual accountability.

[theptip]

Echoing this. GCP support is responsive and fairly effective. It’s a bit expensive, but that is a different matter.

This comes up on HN periodically, and I think folks have very mistaken assumptions about GCP based on Google’s reputation for poor or non-existent support on free consumer-facing services like gmail; GCP and Gsuite are very much serious enterprise services.

[skrebbel]

I can't find the links back, but there's been stories on HN about paid GCP accounts being blocked because of actions taken in connected GSuite accounts (or GMail? ie the mail was free but the GCP was paid? Can't recall) that Google's automation deemed malicious.

Surely the consumer stories are much more prevalent, but to my memory it's not only been that.

[theptip]

I’m sure someone has been taken down in this way on GCP, and if you’re on AWS you could get taken down like this too (see Parler). It’s really hard to quantify the risk here but my priors are that if you are a normal business that is not doing anything illegal then the risk is vanishingly small, and that GCP is not worse than AWS.

I think that building on a cloud platform (or other SaaS like an Oracle DB) and getting your license cost increased is a much bigger business risk.

Either way building your system to be easy to lift and shift to another provider (or on prem) has merit to hedge against these risks, but it also slows you down.

[antonvs]

> Either way building your system to be easy to lift and shift to another provider (or on prem) has merit to hedge against these risks, but it also slows you down.

Not necessarily. Kubernetes is a great way to hedge against that. You can write fully cloud-native autoscaling apps that have minimal dependencies on the hosting environment.

[theptip]

I agree, and chose k8s for this reason, but it’s definitely more work to run your own message queue vs. using SQS etc, so I don’t think it solves all of the friction here.

[gundmc]

This story was debunked/refuted:

https://old.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banne...

[wmf]

A paid account != a Production or Premium support account, though.

[deathanatos]

In every cloud provider I've used, filing a support ticket was done from within their web UI. And that meant logging in.

If Google bans your org for unknown/nebulous reasons, and you're not able to log in, can you get to those support channels?

[antonvs]

We have email addresses and phone numbers we can call, so yes. Phone support is available on any of the paid support options.