[sleepydog]

I've been in GCP support for over 4 years. My opinions are my own. I try to stay as impartial as I can about my employer. I know there are a lot of valid criticisms to be made about GCP. As one of the people often bearing the brunt of the fallout whenever there is a painful outage or deprecation, I share some of them.

But it never gets easy to read posts like this. This one appears to be a collection of old hacker news posts. And I can't help but think about all the posts that are never written, submitted, or upvoted about every time someone had a good experience with support. No one talks about their GCE VMs with years of uptime.

I'll spend hours on video calls with customers, going through logs, packet captures, perf profiles, core dumps, reading their code, conducting tests. Unpacking the tangled web until the problem is obvious. It's always a good feeling when we get to the end, and you get to reveal it like the end of a mystery novel. For me, that's the good part. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours. Sometimes weeks. Months even. And then the customer goes on with their life, as they should.

That's how it always should work. But no one talks about when a process works the way it's supposed to. People want to read about failures. And trade their own analyses about why that failure happened and how Google is fundamentally broken for these N simple reasons.

I don't want to diminish the negative stories as they are about people who went through real pain. I also realize that I'm just one person, and I can only work with so many customers in my time here. I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, keep an open mind. This is a highly competitive field. There are strong incentives for GCP to listen to its customers.

[tpetry]

I am on GCP, the greatest fear is not they increasing prices or disabling a product it‘s getting flagged and not being able to do anything. The support has been helpfull, that‘s true.

I guess having this fear is mostly people on hn reading these stories so often and how it is resolved: knowing someone at google. I don‘t know anyone and i should not have to. There should be some contact for disabled accounts you can reach. I am all the time looking at aws which does not have this problem but gcp is so much easier to use.

[nikanj]

The only viable alternative to knowing someone at Google, is getting your story to the front page of HN / Slashdot / similar, and hoping someone from the other side of the wall reaches out.

[mekster]

> no one talks about when a process works the way it's supposed to. People want to read about failures.

No, people don't want to read about failures. People want to expect services work as advertised. People write when something doesn't live up to the standard that it should have, even if 99% others are fine.

Years of uptime is expected, so no one writes about that of course but if it goes beyond one's expectation, like being able to run a server for 10 years and over without a down time, I'm sure people start to feel like writing positive stories.

[pm90]

Hey, thanks for all that you’ve done. My experience with GCP has been an incredibly positive one. GCP documentation has always seemed fantastic. Our TAMs were very responsive.

GCP support has by far been the best support experience. I have to say that the initial days it seemed to suck. The UI was some 90s google group clone which wasn’t even accessible through the GCP console, it was its own separate site which I always found amusing. But over time, the UI and quality of support became more streamlined and predictable, and I consider it one of the best SaaS support experiences today.

One particular incident I’ll never forget is a support person arguing with me why network tags based firewalls are better overall for security than service accounts based firewalls. I expected to have a very cut and dry exchange but the support engineer actually did convince me that tags are superior to using service accounts. I did not ever expect to have had such a discussion over enterprise support tickets.

[Xunjin]

Ahh I actually love those conversations, when they express the knowledge in a way that actually helps build your own understanding about the product and use it better.

Dear HN reader, if you ever did that to really help a costumer, you are a truly MVP :P

[Something1234]

Can we get some details about this exchange? I've never heard of this type of firewall discussion.

[nostrebored]

The thing that always gets me is when this is presented as some sort of huge commitment -- this is the bare minimum that enterprise support plans provide and have provided for decades.

[virgilp]

> No one talks about their GCE VMs with years of uptime.

This is literally what you sell. It's like a restaurant owner complaining about the bad reviews, saying "nobody talks about all the people that we fed and never got food poisoning!". Yeah, I only need to hear about a few of those to be concerned about going there, I don't care it's less than 1% of your customers that get food poisoning.

[Ironlink]

On the contrary, I think it is quite normal to leave a positive review when you've had a good time at a restaurant. When I look for restaurants, I certainly read both positive and negative reviews.

You make this almost binary by using food poisoning as your metaphor (either you get it or you don't), but normally there is a much more nuanced range of experiences.

[tester34]

I don't think they sell 100% of uptime, I guess it is around 99.9....

[virgilp]

I never said they do, I said they sell "GCE VMs with years of uptime" i.e. "just pay for VM and let us worry about maintenance, you can simply assume it works for all intents and purposes".

But, the kind of stuff that people are worried about is not VM uptime. It's "honest customer being banned with no recourse and having entire livehood destroyed". You don't hear Google bragging that "we have an SLA of 99.9% service to honest customers - we only destroy 1 out of every 1000 businesses that choose us!". You can bet that their SLA there is 100%, even if it's not achievable, 100% is absolutely their target. Just like the target for Facebook is 100% security, and you won't hear Zuck bragging that "we are 99.9% secure, we only leak your private data once every 3 years!".

[spacemanmatt]

> There are strong incentives for GCP to listen to its customers.

I really want to believe this, but my experience as a Google customer (not GCP, but Suite, Fiber, Fi, GMPAA, etc.) leads me strictly away from considering a business dependency on Google.

I want to love the products but they vanish. I want to love the Google but they're not around when I need them most.

[fsociety]

Idk sample size of 1, I’ve seen Cloud SQL almost bring a startup to death with issues. We wanted to move to AWS but migrating the data was too cost/time/risk prohibitive. The support engineer was helpful but ultimately the issues faced were not prioritized because we weren’t Google. Being not too specific for privacy.

[alephnan]

This crowd also harshly criticized the Coinbase founder / Bitcoin when we he was looking for a co-founder, and now his share of Coinbase is worth $10 billion or so.

[nikanj]

We also harshly criticized 642 other "I just need a programmer"-posts here that month, and all of those companies are bankrupt and long forgotten

[alephnan]

But the Coinbase founder was a technical one.

[encryptluks2]

There is a lot of competing business interest here. I always look at a post like this as possibly having ulterior motives.