[bklyn11201]

I'm in agreement with the author: without more detail or pushback from the Google Cloud leaders, this is a really bad look for future customers.

Will this well-publicized event materially alter cloud spend (e.g., cross-cloud replication or backups)?

This seems like an amazing time for AWS and Azure to come out with statements how they prevent accidents like this and why single staff members aren't capable of nuking a large company's cloud account.

[gipp]

> I'm in agreement with the author: without more detail or pushback from the Google Cloud leaders, this is a really bad look for future customers.

That's exactly the opposite of what he said:

> [...] putting out a competing statement blaming or contradicting your customer is a bad look with that customer and with all future customers.

[amluto]

Then issue a technical statement saying that such-and-such API was called with such-and-such parameter, and it did the following bad thing, and here’s why, and here’s what we’re doing to make it harder to do it by accident in the future.

In Google’s case, Google already has a reputation for poor-to-miserable support and for arbitrarily removing its users’ access to their data. (Heck, another incident of this sort was on HN today.) GCP gets considerably revenue from very large users, and those users and their decision makers will do just fine moving from GCP (which is not #1!) to AWS. [0]

Imagine an aircraft manufacturer or regulator in a similar situation. A plane crashed, and it behaved as documented or intended given pilot inputs. But it still crashed, and the factors causing it should be identified and appropriate improvements, if any, should be implemented.

[0] Some of them will grumble about how AWS’s user experience is dramatically worse than GCP’s in a lot of very obvious ways, but the overall comparison tilts strongly toward AWS here. Sure, AWS makes it miserable to configure Organizations and Accounts in line with best practices, but Google might arbitrarily delete a project/account/whatever! Google should get out ahead of this.

[pm90]

> Google should get out ahead of this.

Absolutely. Not only should they get ahead, the should be providing detailed technical details as to what went wrong and how they are ensuring that it won’t happen again. The lack of details here just screams unseriousness.

[lern_too_spel]

> putting out a competing statement blaming or contradicting your customer is a bad look with that customer and with all future customers.

I don't buy it. Google could explain what the customer did to shoot itself in the foot and how GCE will modify the UX to hide the footgun. Instead, it just says that the customer had a unique configuration. That sounds like a GCE bug.

As I've said many times before, Google doesn't use GCE for critical applications, so you shouldn't either. Amazon and Microsoft use AWS and Azure respectively, but you should carefully consider which cloud services they offer are also used internally.

[barryrandall]

Microsoft can't credibly make those claims about Azure.