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One of the reasons I avoid Google is because they have taken lot of pain to make their customer care totally suck. I mean even IRS and Comcast support does bett

by tn13 11y ago

One of the reasons I avoid Google is because they have taken lot of pain to make their customer care totally suck. I mean even IRS and Comcast support does better compared to Google. I published a very critical release to my Android app few weeks back and realized that it was not getting published at all. It took me a month to get the problem resolved. I don't want to buy a cloud service where the support might be nothing more than bunch of "Help yourself" pages.

latchkey 11y ago
They have a paid support service that is actually pretty good. It sounds like you're avoiding the generic Google in the same way you'd not buy something from Amazon vs. using AWS.
- tn13 11y ago
  As I said Google's reputation is what made me not even bother to try. We all know that AWS and AZURE both are state of art and very competitively priced. If Google wants to beat them they have to win the perception war too. (OR reduce prices substantially).
  - boulos 11y ago
    I don't agree that AWS and Azure are actually competitively priced with Compute Engine anymore. Following our price cut last May and our custom VM shapes, we're often 40% cheaper: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Year-from-Google-Cloud-Platform-still-the-price-performance-leader-in-public-cloudom-google-cloud.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Ye... that's a massive lead (and it's sadly not commonly known). So I agree with you, we need to do better in the perception war, but Compute Engine is hands down the leader in cloud pricing. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and care a lot about our prices).
    - boundlessdreamz 11y ago
      GCE pricing is great but GCS is not. It is much more expensive than S3 or cloudfront (2.5x - 1.3x) when you consider per request costs. I have brought this up a couple of times on HN to Google cloud employees but nothing has changed. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442654 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187600 Other problem areas for GCS compared to S3/Cloudfront 1. SSL support for custom domains in GCS is lacking. 2. Also SSL does not work for domain-named bucket when using <bucket>.storage.googleapis.com/<object> form. You can only use https://storage.googleapis.com/<bucket>/ https://storage.googleapis.com/<bucket>/ This makes using SSL for a static site hosted in SSL very difficult because you can't use relative URLs. Cloudfront has solved it by using URLs of the form http(s)://xxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/<object>
      - boulos 11y ago
        That's fair, our native egress pricing is higher. We've chosen to partner with folks like CloudFlare for what we call CDN Interconnect (https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect) although this was a somewhat recent announcement. As far as GCS pricing goes (rather than egress), I think we've been more cautious on the "cost per op" but really led again on cost per byte. This was especially true when we launched Nearline, triggering AWS to launch S3-IA (but with lots of caveats like small files and still a 25% higher base rate). While not integrated directly into GCS / GCP, does going through CloudFlare alleviate some of your concern?
        boundlessdreamz 11y ago
        CDN interconnect is just a bonus :). I prefer GCS having competitive pricing and features since it will be one fewer service to manage. Also cloudflare is a bit confusing. We only want to serve assets and we serve 3TB per month and I'm not sure if cloudflare is OK with that usage in its free tier option.
        11y ago
  - johansch 11y ago
    So what you are saying is basically that you are not doing your market research properly, instead depending on irrelevant anecdata?
  - milesward 11y ago
    Disclaimer: I work on GCP. AWS and Azure are not price competitive with GCP, we're routinely seeing a a 40% advantage. Check out HTTP://cloud.Google.com/pricing/tco
    - abrookewood 11y ago
      Seriously, go and talk to your marketing guys ... Everyone comes out better if there is a third horse in this race, but Google needs to step up your marketing etc. AWS has a massive presence in terms of conferences, documentation and mind share. Azure has a massive sales team that are offering huge discounts to buy business. Google has ... what exactly?
      - ec109685 11y ago
        Yes, compare this to a typical Amazon high quality blog post: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Google-and-Red-Hat-announce-cloud-based-scalable-file-servers.html?m=1 http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Google-and-R... You have no idea what is actually being offered after reading that. Is it a managed service, a recommended configuration of what. Almost every Amazon blog post includes a walk through on how you actually use whatever they are talking about. To be fair, this post does link to more documentation, but it's general purpose and describes a variety of solutions.
  - devsquid 11y ago
    AWS is often competitively priced, but Azure is usually around twice as expensive.
  - latchkey 11y ago
    Our Google hosting costs are a rounding error compared with our revenue. That's all that matters. Build business that make money.
boulos 11y ago
We offer paid support for Cloud (http://cloud.google.com/support http://cloud.google.com/support) that let you trade off responsive time (e.g., 4 hours vs 1) for price. The support personnel (and engineering!) also do best effort scanning of Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and per-product mailing lists. You can get links to those here: https://cloud.google.com/support/#community https://cloud.google.com/support/#community. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, but not in Support (though I do jump in and support customers!)
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  What kind of support am I going to get if I'm just tinkering with the platform? Maybe I'm just used to AWS but I always found the GCE interface (at least for launching VMs) a lot more difficult to use.
  - boulos 11y ago
    Sorry to hear that. Is there something specific about our current console you find hard to use? Perhaps I'm used to both (and I'm biased) but I like our create instance page just fine. Like I mentioned above, we do have active communities on Stack Overflow, per-product mailing lists (in this case https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gce-discussion https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gce-discussion) and Server Fault.
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      I'll have to try again. The last time I tried to use GCE I had to create some kind of linked project before I could even start to create a VM.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Did not know about this. To me, Google has a terrible reputation when it comes to support and keeping products with large numbers of users running. Edit: (posted too soon) my main concerns with putting anything on GC are around support, continued support / long-term commitment to the platform, ease of switching (App Engine was a very bad on boarding experience for me when I tried it a few years ago and required lots of GCE-specific ways of doing things in the code), and pricing differences that might make it cost way more in subtle ways to run a thing on GC. I think it'd be good for Google to start fixing their story around support and commitment to products with everything else under the Google brand before people will be wanting to risk their infrastructure with that brand.
nrh 11y ago
Spotifier here. One of the big risks that we identified with the Google partnership was exactly this: Google isn't exactly known for awesome customer service. We've been very pleasantly surprised. The cloud team has been pretty awesome to work with, including lots of engineer<->engineer contact, walk-throughs of systems and code for critical dependencies, and solid support and collaboration. Exceeded our expectations.
- tn13 11y ago
  I am not surprised. Spotify is a big company. The question is will it work exactly same for Joe's Inc.
  - boulos 11y ago
    I think latchkey at the top of this thread is precisely "Joe's Inc".
    - latchkey 11y ago
      Yes, that is the way we started out, but at this rate, if we do it right, we will be a moderately big company by the end of the year. =)
- stegro32 11y ago
  We are much smaller, but also use the Google paid support. I'd echo the sentiment here: my experience of the paid support for GCP has been universally excellent across Compute Engine, App Engine, BigQuery and Cloud Storage. This is across 30ish tickets, some of them quite complex.
  - nulltype 11y ago
    I use the lowest level of paid support, I think it is the silver plan, and have observed similarly high quality levels of support. Sometimes you get a lower level support dude and have to convince him that your issue is real, but overall the support is good.
marincounty 11y ago
I've had problems with their customer support. It got to the point, I just gave up, and left my videos on YouTube. (My problem was that slick move they made when they bought YouTube, and messed with the login names.) I just try to forget they are up there. I got to one person at Google, and when they realized I didn't want to advertise, it was "Go to the help boards. I don't deal with that stuff." Do I still use their products--yes, but don't trust them like I used to. I usually avoid customer service like the flu virus, but thought Google would be different? I guess they are big enough to not care?
- asuffield 11y ago
  (Tedious disclaimer: my opinions only, not representing anybody else or my employer. I work at Google, not on YouTube) There is a big difference between paying for one of the support offerings, versus being a free user. The status of free users is approximately: free access to the product but no support. If you want customer service then you need to open your wallet. It's important to separate "I think the support was bad", which would be very interesting to a lot of people who work here, from "I didn't pay for the product so I didn't receive it". Did you pay for support?

by tn13 11y ago

latchkey 11y ago

They have a paid support service that is actually pretty good. It sounds like you're avoiding the generic Google in the same way you'd not buy something from Amazon vs. using AWS.

tn13 11y ago
As I said Google's reputation is what made me not even bother to try. We all know that AWS and AZURE both are state of art and very competitively priced. If Google wants to beat them they have to win the perception war too. (OR reduce prices substantially).
- boulos 11y ago
  I don't agree that AWS and Azure are actually competitively priced with Compute Engine anymore. Following our price cut last May and our custom VM shapes, we're often 40% cheaper: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Year-from-Google-Cloud-Platform-still-the-price-performance-leader-in-public-cloudom-google-cloud.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Ye... that's a massive lead (and it's sadly not commonly known). So I agree with you, we need to do better in the perception war, but Compute Engine is hands down the leader in cloud pricing. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and care a lot about our prices).
  - boundlessdreamz 11y ago
    GCE pricing is great but GCS is not. It is much more expensive than S3 or cloudfront (2.5x - 1.3x) when you consider per request costs. I have brought this up a couple of times on HN to Google cloud employees but nothing has changed. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442654 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187600 Other problem areas for GCS compared to S3/Cloudfront 1. SSL support for custom domains in GCS is lacking. 2. Also SSL does not work for domain-named bucket when using <bucket>.storage.googleapis.com/<object> form. You can only use https://storage.googleapis.com/<bucket>/ https://storage.googleapis.com/<bucket>/ This makes using SSL for a static site hosted in SSL very difficult because you can't use relative URLs. Cloudfront has solved it by using URLs of the form http(s)://xxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/<object>
    - boulos 11y ago
      That's fair, our native egress pricing is higher. We've chosen to partner with folks like CloudFlare for what we call CDN Interconnect (https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect) although this was a somewhat recent announcement. As far as GCS pricing goes (rather than egress), I think we've been more cautious on the "cost per op" but really led again on cost per byte. This was especially true when we launched Nearline, triggering AWS to launch S3-IA (but with lots of caveats like small files and still a 25% higher base rate). While not integrated directly into GCS / GCP, does going through CloudFlare alleviate some of your concern?
      - boundlessdreamz 11y ago
        CDN interconnect is just a bonus :). I prefer GCS having competitive pricing and features since it will be one fewer service to manage. Also cloudflare is a bit confusing. We only want to serve assets and we serve 3TB per month and I'm not sure if cloudflare is OK with that usage in its free tier option.
        11y ago
- johansch 11y ago
  So what you are saying is basically that you are not doing your market research properly, instead depending on irrelevant anecdata?
- milesward 11y ago
  Disclaimer: I work on GCP. AWS and Azure are not price competitive with GCP, we're routinely seeing a a 40% advantage. Check out HTTP://cloud.Google.com/pricing/tco
  - abrookewood 11y ago
    Seriously, go and talk to your marketing guys ... Everyone comes out better if there is a third horse in this race, but Google needs to step up your marketing etc. AWS has a massive presence in terms of conferences, documentation and mind share. Azure has a massive sales team that are offering huge discounts to buy business. Google has ... what exactly?
    - ec109685 11y ago
      Yes, compare this to a typical Amazon high quality blog post: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Google-and-Red-Hat-announce-cloud-based-scalable-file-servers.html?m=1 http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Google-and-R... You have no idea what is actually being offered after reading that. Is it a managed service, a recommended configuration of what. Almost every Amazon blog post includes a walk through on how you actually use whatever they are talking about. To be fair, this post does link to more documentation, but it's general purpose and describes a variety of solutions.
- devsquid 11y ago
  AWS is often competitively priced, but Azure is usually around twice as expensive.
- latchkey 11y ago
  Our Google hosting costs are a rounding error compared with our revenue. That's all that matters. Build business that make money.

boulos 11y ago

We offer paid support for Cloud (http://cloud.google.com/support http://cloud.google.com/support) that let you trade off responsive time (e.g., 4 hours vs 1) for price. The support personnel (and engineering!) also do best effort scanning of Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and per-product mailing lists. You can get links to those here: https://cloud.google.com/support/#community https://cloud.google.com/support/#community. Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, but not in Support (though I do jump in and support customers!)

voltagex_ 11y ago
What kind of support am I going to get if I'm just tinkering with the platform? Maybe I'm just used to AWS but I always found the GCE interface (at least for launching VMs) a lot more difficult to use.
- boulos 11y ago
  Sorry to hear that. Is there something specific about our current console you find hard to use? Perhaps I'm used to both (and I'm biased) but I like our create instance page just fine. Like I mentioned above, we do have active communities on Stack Overflow, per-product mailing lists (in this case https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gce-discussion https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gce-discussion) and Server Fault.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    I'll have to try again. The last time I tried to use GCE I had to create some kind of linked project before I could even start to create a VM.
seanp2k2 11y ago
Did not know about this. To me, Google has a terrible reputation when it comes to support and keeping products with large numbers of users running. Edit: (posted too soon) my main concerns with putting anything on GC are around support, continued support / long-term commitment to the platform, ease of switching (App Engine was a very bad on boarding experience for me when I tried it a few years ago and required lots of GCE-specific ways of doing things in the code), and pricing differences that might make it cost way more in subtle ways to run a thing on GC. I think it'd be good for Google to start fixing their story around support and commitment to products with everything else under the Google brand before people will be wanting to risk their infrastructure with that brand.

nrh 11y ago

Spotifier here. One of the big risks that we identified with the Google partnership was exactly this: Google isn't exactly known for awesome customer service. We've been very pleasantly surprised. The cloud team has been pretty awesome to work with, including lots of engineer<->engineer contact, walk-throughs of systems and code for critical dependencies, and solid support and collaboration. Exceeded our expectations.

tn13 11y ago
I am not surprised. Spotify is a big company. The question is will it work exactly same for Joe's Inc.
- boulos 11y ago
  I think latchkey at the top of this thread is precisely "Joe's Inc".
  - latchkey 11y ago
    Yes, that is the way we started out, but at this rate, if we do it right, we will be a moderately big company by the end of the year. =)
stegro32 11y ago
We are much smaller, but also use the Google paid support. I'd echo the sentiment here: my experience of the paid support for GCP has been universally excellent across Compute Engine, App Engine, BigQuery and Cloud Storage. This is across 30ish tickets, some of them quite complex.
- nulltype 11y ago
  I use the lowest level of paid support, I think it is the silver plan, and have observed similarly high quality levels of support. Sometimes you get a lower level support dude and have to convince him that your issue is real, but overall the support is good.

marincounty 11y ago

I've had problems with their customer support. It got to the point, I just gave up, and left my videos on YouTube. (My problem was that slick move they made when they bought YouTube, and messed with the login names.) I just try to forget they are up there. I got to one person at Google, and when they realized I didn't want to advertise, it was "Go to the help boards. I don't deal with that stuff." Do I still use their products--yes, but don't trust them like I used to. I usually avoid customer service like the flu virus, but thought Google would be different? I guess they are big enough to not care?

asuffield 11y ago
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinions only, not representing anybody else or my employer. I work at Google, not on YouTube) There is a big difference between paying for one of the support offerings, versus being a free user. The status of free users is approximately: free access to the product but no support. If you want customer service then you need to open your wallet. It's important to separate "I think the support was bad", which would be very interesting to a lot of people who work here, from "I didn't pay for the product so I didn't receive it". Did you pay for support?