[sylens]

Our team at work uses all three major public clouds and our Google Account Team is by far the worst of the three. Nothing like having to explain the same problem I’m having from the start again on every monthly cadence call because they don’t note anything or try to help resolve it

[oofbey]

As a former Googler this doesn’t surprise me at all. Dealing with customers directly is literally seen as failure. Everything at Google is about scale, and automation. If you have to do something manually - anything - then you’re doing it wrong. It’s deep in the culture, or was when I was there. Maybe they’ve gotten better, but no signs this is true.

[mistic92]

I had the same experience with AWS. They even assigned principal someone to our case and guy sent us old blogposts and did nothing. I took a month to find "hidden" checkbox. On GCP I always escalate to pass indian support as they are super incompetent.

[ethbr1]

(I'll take the charitable read and assume you meant an implied poorly trained, low cost Indian support as the descriptor)

Google does and always has treated support as a cost center, rather than a feature or profit center.

This worked for them in the early days and for specific products like Search -- design it well enough and you don't need support*.

Unfortunately, this fails for most other products (and especially all enterprise products) because the magnitude of impacts to a single customer (business instead of user) are so much greater.

F.ex. every conversation I was on with a GCP product team had a weird "Oh, you don't know how anyone who pays for GCP uses it, because you get it for free internally?" flavor.

* Leaving aside the "there's an entire SEO industry to 'support' Search" thing

[verst]

Who is the best? Just curious.

[manquer]

Microsoft. It more than compensated for Azure not being the best product . They are incredibly more responsive, you have multiple points of contacts and escalation chain of actual humans you can meet

they will even come to your customer call or connect with their rep already working with the mutual customer and so on.

AWS has the best tech and but not as good as Microsoft service wise, they certainly improved a lot last few years and it shows but because they don’t have any enterprise apps like MS their footprint is more limited.

Google keeps talking about GCP being important but doesn’t feel anything has changed on ground

[lokar]

My company also used all 3 (at a very large scale / spends). MS was nice, but useless / incompetent technically. Anything non-trivial took forever to get a straight answer or resolve. We rarely got to speak directly to anyone with real expertise.

AWS, we could speak directly to Sr engineers on the relevant team. Full transparency, highly responsive. They were clearly trying to understand our issues and suggest change for both us and themselves.

Google was mostly useless. There was one team I got to talk directly to, who were great. But that was the exception.

[DanielHB]

My experience with AWS hasn't been good when we had major problems in redshift becoming unresponsive. Since it was an intermitent issue and not a full blown blackout they just shrugged and we kept having problems for months.

[gregw2]

I can confirm. Redshift support is mediocre even for a F100 firm with TAM support if the workload is large and complex and you have some needle in the haystack causing problems like you allude to.

Practically speaking keeping an eye on locks and transactions is a good idea, as is watching out for your statistics on key core columns going bad when they shouldn't. (analyze and vacuum sometimes don't actually do anything when you need them to...)

[sylens]

Our AWS account team is incredible. I could ask them for anything and they would get back to me in a day

[jvuygbbkuurx]

Microsoft of course

[isaisabella]

Why not Oracle

[smallmancontrov]

Because Oracle = Larry Ellison = The Lawnmower

> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. -Bryan Cantrill

A few years back someone at work stuck their hand in the lawnmower. I've seen this happen a few times, but that time it ended with Oracle fining us for every VirtualBox install and the company sent The IT Spanish Inquisition around to make sure we all deleted it off our computers. Fun times.

[senkora]

You honestly just have to treat any Oracle product as malware, and proactively scan for it / block it from being installed on employee laptops in the first place.

[mc32]

They also seem to keep revolving team-members so you're always explaining things all over to new people.