9 ms·

All of Google's cloud database services are now out of beta

173 points by smb06 10y ago

kevindeasis 10y ago
This is awesome. I hope they start releasing features about geoqueries for datastore.
- colink 10y ago
  While it is not part of Datastore, Cloud does currently support geographical queries via the Search API: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/training/fts_adv/lesson1#location-based_queries_geosearch https://cloud.google.com/appengine/training/fts_adv/lesson1#...
  - chippy 10y ago
    note that this is currently a very simple radius search for points. So it cannot do point in polygon, intersections, allow shapes for data points etc
- _puk 10y ago
  Similar to above, check the recently deleted album and then select remove all to actually free up the space.
douche 10y ago
Next step, end-of-life...
- daveguy 10y ago
  Normally I would agree, but not in this case. It is unlikely they will EOL these services any time soon. They are paid services and could represent a significant revenue stream for Google.
  - chippy 10y ago
    > could represent a significant revenue stream If it does not, we should, like other Google offerings, expect it to be cut. Google has a strict internal business case (new from around 2010 or so) - what they do now has to make money, it's no longer enough to be getting more people to use the internet, or increase use in the brand, the services has to make business sense. Let's hope it is used and profitable, eh.
    - daveguy 10y ago
      > what they do now has to make money That's a fair concern. However, as of 2015 they already have between 3 and 5 % of the cloud market [0][1]. It is likely they are already profitable with the usage they have (cloud is pretty high margin). There have been very few google products that were officially taken out of beta. Google Search and Google Mail are two of those. True, Google has a terrible reputation for dumping small dev and consumer facing products. Their cloud offerings are a completely different category. Not least of which, because they have no free tier -- only free trial. Anyone who continues to use Google Cloud products is paying for them. [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topp... [1] http://dazeinfo.com/2015/05/22/amazon-aws-google-cloud-microsoft-azure/ http://dazeinfo.com/2015/05/22/amazon-aws-google-cloud-micro...
  - ffggvv 10y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      You are linking to a disputed "leak", which has been more or less debunked, in response to something completely unrelated. Did you think this through?
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  As the saying goes: yeah, no. Sure, Google's less-loved consumer-facing products and minor dev stuff tend to die various kinds of sad deaths. But they don't make much money. Not compared to the Mississippi of Money that is advertising. But let's remember: most of the money in the world isn't flowing from consumers to businesses. It sure looks that way, because many of the largest companies in the world make their money selling to consumers. But it's an illusion. Most of the money sloshing around is in the structure of production: the vast web of inputs, transformations and services that fan in until it gets to you presenting a wad of the hard-earned. These days the structure of production needs information to make it work. And you need some sort of Turing machine to do stuff with and to that information. Other machines to acquire, retrieve and store it. Still other machines to make all the others go. And someone clever to run all these things. Now that it's simple to take chunks of information work and just magically send it somewhere, why the hell would you do something as capitally, criminally inefficient as buy super-rapidly depreciating atoms? Squirting electrons down a wire is fantastically better business. The worldwide economy is measured in the many trillions. Some major, majority fraction of that economy is the structure of production. Some not-insubstantial percentage of the structure of production is in managing and transforming information. Total addressable market is billions, heaped on billions, with a side serving of deep-fried billions. If Google abandon GCP, the shareholders won't need to have voting control to exact vengeance. They'll bodily drag execs into the street and beat them to death with rolled-up Amazon boxes.
  - quickben 10y ago
    Of course, since physics is still a thing, the above is unsustainable. Graph electricity usage increase on the planet, and in 20-100 years we will need to convert the output of the sun, to sustain they present slope. Hence why it will change to be in equilibrium with that you were replying to. Just don't mistake the current spur with some kind of everlasting trend.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Slow day in "enterprise C# development"?
vgt 10y ago
TL;DR: 1. Cloud Bigtable is GA [0] 2. Cloud Datastore GA [1] 3. Cloud SQL 2.0 GA [2] 4. Persistent Disk SSD now gets 25,000 IOPS [3] 5. SQL Server images available [3] 6. Custom Encryption Keys in Google Cloud Storage [3] 7. Google Nearline Storage access latency now real-time [3] POV: - Bigtable can reach some serious scale for Hbase-style workloads (ex: Sungard got 34m reads per second and 23m writes per second[4] ). - Datastore serves almost 6m qps on average [1] - Cloud SQL 2.0 compares favorably against AWS RDS and Aurora [2] - Persistent Disk SSD compares favorably against options in the marketplace[5] - Nearline is archival storage with real-time access characteristics [0] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Google-Cloud-Bigtable-is-generally-available-for-petabyte-scale-NoSQL-workloads.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Google-Cloud-Bi...) [1] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/google-cloud-datastore-serves-over-15.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/google-cloud-da...) [2] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Cloud-SQL-Second-Generation-performance-and-feature-deep-dive.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Cloud-SQL-Secon...) [3] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/why-Google-Cloud-Platform-is-ready-for-your-enterprise-database-workloads.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/why-Google-Clou...) [4] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-services-firm-processes-25-billion-stock-market-events-per-hour-with-Google-Cloud-Bigtable.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-servi...) [5] (https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-amazing-price-to-performance-2a58e7d9b433#.3ckq4e4iz https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-a...) (Disc: work on Google Cloud)
- jhgg 10y ago
  Does the SSD iops increase happen automatically? Or do we have to turn it on somewhere or recreate the disk? Also any plan to allow objects in GCS bucket to automatically move to nearline after a specified time, like s3 to glacier?
  - thesandlord 10y ago
    Should be automatic. Remember your max IOPS are also limited by core count. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance#relationship_between_size_and_performance https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance#rela...
caseyf7 10y ago
However, their billing system is definitely not out of beta.
- kyrra 10y ago
  Care to elaborate on the issues you have with GCP billing?
  - dabeeeenster 10y ago
    The old UI was way better Im afraid to say! It was very easy to view the last day's costs with it - seems to be impossible with the new UI?
  - us0r 10y ago
    I can't use my normal rewards card as it can't tell the difference between prepaid card and non prepaid. Seems like a hard thing to screw up considering you can google a list of prepaid bin numbers.
    - kyrra 10y ago
      Can you open a ticket with GCP billing that you believe it's misclassifying your card as a prepaid card when it really isn't? If you have the card on record on your account, someone may be able to look into it (but no guarantees). I'll see if I can ping the people that handle BIN data to see how we handle these kinds of issues. Disclaimer: I work in payments at Google.
    - kyrra 10y ago
      Follow-up: a ticket seems to be your best recourse. I'm not sure anything can be done, but letting the Cloud billing team know your specific card is having problems may allow them to fix it. This can actually be a hard problem as some banks/issuers intermix prepaid and normal credit cards BINs (and I'm sure there are other issues I don't know about)
  - markdown 10y ago
    I manage a few accounts for different clients of mine. Now and then (not often) I get an email about some billing service being discontinued (or perhaps a free trial of something has ended). When this happens, I have no idea which account it refers to as the emails provide no details. I just have to cross my fingers and hope nothing goes offline. EDIT: Here's what they look like: http://i.imgur.com/XcatLQm.png http://i.imgur.com/XcatLQm.png AFAIK the account id denoted there as XXX-XXXXX-XXX is some behind-the-scenes account identified that isn't displayed anywhere in the UI. To hunt it down, I would have to log into a google account, then click on the link. Then repeat over and over with a dozen google accounts until I log into the one actually tied to that billing account. Ridiculous.
perlin 10y ago
Great, now fix PubSub and Stackdriver, and GCP starts to look attractive...
- euyyn 10y ago
  What specific issues do you have with PubSub and with Stackdriver?
  - pacala 10y ago
    I've setup a Stackdriver account today. My colleagues [Editors on the monitored project], when navigating to [0], were prompted to create a new Stackdriver account. They could not see the one I just created, nor were they presented with the GCP project we are using. There was no obvious way to invite them to join the project, more generally there was no obvious way to manage user accounts, though I could see and edit my Profile, which does show [readonly] that I'm an "Admin", though I don't know how to make other people "Admin", or what other roles are available. It was not obvious to check which project "hosts" the Stackdriver account. There was no obvious link to a forum or chat to discuss the issue, only a "Send Feedback" link who-knows-when somebody will look at. We eventually solved the issue by passing around [1], which is not obviously displayed anywhere. I scrapped it by right clicking and <Copy Link Address> somewhere in the UI [I forgot where]. I'm bullish on Google Cloud [founder on GCE & long departed, hi there guys], so I put a solid 30 minutes of sleuthing in it, but someone less determined would have gave up a whole lot sooner. [0] https://app.google.stackdriver.com https://app.google.stackdriver.com [1] https://app.google.stackdriver.com/account/login/<project-id> https://app.google.stackdriver.com/account/login/<project-id...
    - pacala 10y ago
      PS. After getting past the initial hiccup, we've setup our basic monitoring and infrastructure in a few hours. Coming to working with ops after a couple years hiatus, Stackdriver is incredibly comprehensive and easy to use. Let's see how the systems will hold moving forward.
  - kozikow 10y ago
myth17 10y ago
On Cloud SQL : If you start with 10GB amount of storage, you can always get more storage but never decrease your storage amount. Why?
- nordsieck 10y ago
  They almost certainly don't want to deal with races involving incoming data and a request to decrease storage volume.
  - boulos 10y ago
    That's almost right. Most modern filesystems are okay with resizing upwards, but very unprepared for downwards (even when lots of bytes are not yet touched!). So it's really just the "restriction" from GCE that comes from "normal file systems don't like this". Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud, but I'm not a filesystem expert.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Honestly it is trivial to do a full dump and reload a new instance with a smaller disk. Like 5 minutes and 3 clicks easy.
samhamilton 10y ago
Dear Google, pretty please add some Postgres support
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  +1 Google almost seems deliberately adamant in not wanting to do anything with postures.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Nope, but samhamilton has it right. Getting this in place was really the first step. While I personally like Postgres myself, it's still the case that MySQL dominates in terms of install base and dollars.
- theDoug 10y ago
  Already available if you wanna spin up your own GCE: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres Or! Through the Launcher for about $5/month to start https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-launchpad/postgresql?q=postg&project=no-idea-what-project https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la... I can imagine with time we see it make an appearance as a managed service, like the other databases, as well.
  - samhamilton 10y ago
    Yep - currently rolling my own on GCE but would really love them to roll out managed service to handle failover. Hopefully now that their v2 has gone GA it releases someone to work on adding new db types.
- mythz 10y ago
  +1 don't see why they're putting in the effort of providing managed SQL Server hosting when PostgreSQL still needs doing.
  - numbsafari 10y ago
jjnoakes 10y ago
I've noticed what I will call inconsistencies with some of Google's free products. I see see space taken up in my drive account by pictures but I can't find them in my Google pictures, drive, hangouts, Picasa Web albums, nowhere. I also see things via the drive API that were shared with me long ago, but which I can't access (or remove) via the web interface. These don't give me confidence in the overall infrastructure. Has anyone noticed anything similarly disconcerting about their cloud services? Or are those more stable? I'd like to migrate some work to them but I'm justifiably uneasy about what quality to expect. Are things more solid in the paid space?
- quwert95 10y ago
  >I see see space taken up in my drive account by pictures but I can't find them in my Google pictures, drive, hangouts, Picasa Web albums, nowhere. I ran into a similar issue with Google Drive/Gmail. Have you checked the trash? Things stay in the trash until you delete them (and some Google services are configured to keep things in the trash for up to 30 days for automated pruning). The 'quota' page may help you pinpoint where the space takers are hiding: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota
  - jjnoakes 10y ago
    Yep, trash was one of the first things I checked.
- deelowe 10y ago
  Cloud is a completely different animal from the free stuff.
- zatkin 10y ago
  I experience the same issue with Apple's Storage mechanism on the iPhone. I have 0 photos, but my Storage/Usage says that I'm using ~100+ MB...
  - tomassre 10y ago
    I had this same issue (a while ago). I believe the solution was to turn back on icloud photos and then your photos show up in the photos app where you can delete them, and then turn off icloud photos again (convenient)
ffggvv 10y ago
Why is a business name required?
- boulos 10y ago
  I'm guessing you're in Europe. First, let me say we're sorry. The explanation unfortunately is VAT collection and reporting, which we don't (currently) do for you. A business is already required to do so, but for individuals would have to do their own / represent that they're doing so. My understanding is that it's also per country, requiring either a per-country holding company or some sort of extra accounting. tl;dr: VAT (and yes we should handle this for you, but don't today). Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud, but I am not a tax lawyer (nor even a lawyer).
a_imho 10y ago
Does Google offer any sensible support though without paying consultant prices? My pain with Google services that it is very rare to have any contact address where you can get more than basic information. No, clicking through a FAQ does not help, not to mention when you are forwarded to out of date pages because Google decided to override your language of choice.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  If you want free support you generally do the mailing list. The times I have asked I got an exact answer from someone on the team the same day.
- manigandham 10y ago
  GCP support prices are some of the cheapest for any cloud provider, and access to real engineers.
- boulos 10y ago
  The Silver (Basic Paid Support) plan at https://cloud.google.com/support https://cloud.google.com/support is $150/month. And sorry about the language issues, we've tried to have lots of translations but got consistent feedback from customers that unless we were going to do an amazing job we should just not bother.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I am a fan, and a user, of Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS: because of extra APIs and services. However I find the price differences for plain VPSs between these platforms and more bare bone VPS providers like OVH and dedicated server providers like Hetzner to be surprising. I understand that sometimes you get what you pay for in reliability, fast networks, etc. but still the price difference is huge. I like having a single large memory, multiple core VPS for fast development and earlier this year I would spin a GCE instance up and down as needed. I transitioned several months ago to an always on large memory OVH VPS, much more convenient. When I need more cores and memory Hetzner has incredible pricing on dedicated servers.
mxuribe 10y ago
This is good news; even if only for upping the competition with azure and aws. The more legitimate options in the cloud that exist for enterprise, etc., the better!
fasterthanlime 10y ago
Sorry to hijack that comment thread but since the Google Cloud team is around, who should I talk to about this? https://github.com/itchio/butler/issues/71 https://github.com/itchio/butler/issues/71 Not seeing anything on the status page nor any outside confirmation, but many independent reports from our users, all in EU pushing to US zones. I'm looking forward to using more Google Cloud services, but unreported (partial) outages are making me wary :(

173 points by smb06 10y ago

kevindeasis 10y ago

This is awesome. I hope they start releasing features about geoqueries for datastore.

colink 10y ago
While it is not part of Datastore, Cloud does currently support geographical queries via the Search API: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/training/fts_adv/lesson1#location-based_queries_geosearch https://cloud.google.com/appengine/training/fts_adv/lesson1#...
- chippy 10y ago
  note that this is currently a very simple radius search for points. So it cannot do point in polygon, intersections, allow shapes for data points etc
_puk 10y ago
Similar to above, check the recently deleted album and then select remove all to actually free up the space.

douche 10y ago

Next step, end-of-life...

daveguy 10y ago
Normally I would agree, but not in this case. It is unlikely they will EOL these services any time soon. They are paid services and could represent a significant revenue stream for Google.
- chippy 10y ago
  > could represent a significant revenue stream If it does not, we should, like other Google offerings, expect it to be cut. Google has a strict internal business case (new from around 2010 or so) - what they do now has to make money, it's no longer enough to be getting more people to use the internet, or increase use in the brand, the services has to make business sense. Let's hope it is used and profitable, eh.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    > what they do now has to make money That's a fair concern. However, as of 2015 they already have between 3 and 5 % of the cloud market [0][1]. It is likely they are already profitable with the usage they have (cloud is pretty high margin). There have been very few google products that were officially taken out of beta. Google Search and Google Mail are two of those. True, Google has a terrible reputation for dumping small dev and consumer facing products. Their cloud offerings are a completely different category. Not least of which, because they have no free tier -- only free trial. Anyone who continues to use Google Cloud products is paying for them. [0] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2015-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topp... [1] http://dazeinfo.com/2015/05/22/amazon-aws-google-cloud-microsoft-azure/ http://dazeinfo.com/2015/05/22/amazon-aws-google-cloud-micro...
- ffggvv 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667976
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    You are linking to a disputed "leak", which has been more or less debunked, in response to something completely unrelated. Did you think this through?
jacques_chester 10y ago
As the saying goes: yeah, no. Sure, Google's less-loved consumer-facing products and minor dev stuff tend to die various kinds of sad deaths. But they don't make much money. Not compared to the Mississippi of Money that is advertising. But let's remember: most of the money in the world isn't flowing from consumers to businesses. It sure looks that way, because many of the largest companies in the world make their money selling to consumers. But it's an illusion. Most of the money sloshing around is in the structure of production: the vast web of inputs, transformations and services that fan in until it gets to you presenting a wad of the hard-earned. These days the structure of production needs information to make it work. And you need some sort of Turing machine to do stuff with and to that information. Other machines to acquire, retrieve and store it. Still other machines to make all the others go. And someone clever to run all these things. Now that it's simple to take chunks of information work and just magically send it somewhere, why the hell would you do something as capitally, criminally inefficient as buy super-rapidly depreciating atoms? Squirting electrons down a wire is fantastically better business. The worldwide economy is measured in the many trillions. Some major, majority fraction of that economy is the structure of production. Some not-insubstantial percentage of the structure of production is in managing and transforming information. Total addressable market is billions, heaped on billions, with a side serving of deep-fried billions. If Google abandon GCP, the shareholders won't need to have voting control to exact vengeance. They'll bodily drag execs into the street and beat them to death with rolled-up Amazon boxes.
- quickben 10y ago
  Of course, since physics is still a thing, the above is unsustainable. Graph electricity usage increase on the planet, and in 20-100 years we will need to convert the output of the sun, to sustain they present slope. Hence why it will change to be in equilibrium with that you were replying to. Just don't mistake the current spur with some kind of everlasting trend.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
Slow day in "enterprise C# development"?

vgt 10y ago

TL;DR: 1. Cloud Bigtable is GA [0] 2. Cloud Datastore GA [1] 3. Cloud SQL 2.0 GA [2] 4. Persistent Disk SSD now gets 25,000 IOPS [3] 5. SQL Server images available [3] 6. Custom Encryption Keys in Google Cloud Storage [3] 7. Google Nearline Storage access latency now real-time [3] POV: - Bigtable can reach some serious scale for Hbase-style workloads (ex: Sungard got 34m reads per second and 23m writes per second[4] ). - Datastore serves almost 6m qps on average [1] - Cloud SQL 2.0 compares favorably against AWS RDS and Aurora [2] - Persistent Disk SSD compares favorably against options in the marketplace[5] - Nearline is archival storage with real-time access characteristics [0] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Google-Cloud-Bigtable-is-generally-available-for-petabyte-scale-NoSQL-workloads.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Google-Cloud-Bi...) [1] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/google-cloud-datastore-serves-over-15.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/google-cloud-da...) [2] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Cloud-SQL-Second-Generation-performance-and-feature-deep-dive.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/Cloud-SQL-Secon...) [3] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/why-Google-Cloud-Platform-is-ready-for-your-enterprise-database-workloads.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/why-Google-Clou...) [4] (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-services-firm-processes-25-billion-stock-market-events-per-hour-with-Google-Cloud-Bigtable.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-servi...) [5] (https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-amazing-price-to-performance-2a58e7d9b433#.3ckq4e4iz https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-a...) (Disc: work on Google Cloud)

jhgg 10y ago
Does the SSD iops increase happen automatically? Or do we have to turn it on somewhere or recreate the disk? Also any plan to allow objects in GCS bucket to automatically move to nearline after a specified time, like s3 to glacier?
- thesandlord 10y ago
  Should be automatic. Remember your max IOPS are also limited by core count. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance#relationship_between_size_and_performance https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance#rela...

caseyf7 10y ago

However, their billing system is definitely not out of beta.

kyrra 10y ago
Care to elaborate on the issues you have with GCP billing?
- dabeeeenster 10y ago
  The old UI was way better Im afraid to say! It was very easy to view the last day's costs with it - seems to be impossible with the new UI?
- us0r 10y ago
  I can't use my normal rewards card as it can't tell the difference between prepaid card and non prepaid. Seems like a hard thing to screw up considering you can google a list of prepaid bin numbers.
  - kyrra 10y ago
    Can you open a ticket with GCP billing that you believe it's misclassifying your card as a prepaid card when it really isn't? If you have the card on record on your account, someone may be able to look into it (but no guarantees). I'll see if I can ping the people that handle BIN data to see how we handle these kinds of issues. Disclaimer: I work in payments at Google.
  - kyrra 10y ago
    Follow-up: a ticket seems to be your best recourse. I'm not sure anything can be done, but letting the Cloud billing team know your specific card is having problems may allow them to fix it. This can actually be a hard problem as some banks/issuers intermix prepaid and normal credit cards BINs (and I'm sure there are other issues I don't know about)
- markdown 10y ago
  I manage a few accounts for different clients of mine. Now and then (not often) I get an email about some billing service being discontinued (or perhaps a free trial of something has ended). When this happens, I have no idea which account it refers to as the emails provide no details. I just have to cross my fingers and hope nothing goes offline. EDIT: Here's what they look like: http://i.imgur.com/XcatLQm.png http://i.imgur.com/XcatLQm.png AFAIK the account id denoted there as XXX-XXXXX-XXX is some behind-the-scenes account identified that isn't displayed anywhere in the UI. To hunt it down, I would have to log into a google account, then click on the link. Then repeat over and over with a dozen google accounts until I log into the one actually tied to that billing account. Ridiculous.

perlin 10y ago

Great, now fix PubSub and Stackdriver, and GCP starts to look attractive...

euyyn 10y ago
What specific issues do you have with PubSub and with Stackdriver?
- pacala 10y ago
  I've setup a Stackdriver account today. My colleagues [Editors on the monitored project], when navigating to [0], were prompted to create a new Stackdriver account. They could not see the one I just created, nor were they presented with the GCP project we are using. There was no obvious way to invite them to join the project, more generally there was no obvious way to manage user accounts, though I could see and edit my Profile, which does show [readonly] that I'm an "Admin", though I don't know how to make other people "Admin", or what other roles are available. It was not obvious to check which project "hosts" the Stackdriver account. There was no obvious link to a forum or chat to discuss the issue, only a "Send Feedback" link who-knows-when somebody will look at. We eventually solved the issue by passing around [1], which is not obviously displayed anywhere. I scrapped it by right clicking and <Copy Link Address> somewhere in the UI [I forgot where]. I'm bullish on Google Cloud [founder on GCE & long departed, hi there guys], so I put a solid 30 minutes of sleuthing in it, but someone less determined would have gave up a whole lot sooner. [0] https://app.google.stackdriver.com https://app.google.stackdriver.com [1] https://app.google.stackdriver.com/account/login/<project-id> https://app.google.stackdriver.com/account/login/<project-id...
  - pacala 10y ago
    PS. After getting past the initial hiccup, we've setup our basic monitoring and infrastructure in a few hours. Coming to working with ops after a couple years hiatus, Stackdriver is incredibly comprehensive and easy to use. Let's see how the systems will hold moving forward.
- kozikow 10y ago

myth17 10y ago

On Cloud SQL : If you start with 10GB amount of storage, you can always get more storage but never decrease your storage amount. Why?

nordsieck 10y ago
They almost certainly don't want to deal with races involving incoming data and a request to decrease storage volume.
- boulos 10y ago
  That's almost right. Most modern filesystems are okay with resizing upwards, but very unprepared for downwards (even when lots of bytes are not yet touched!). So it's really just the "restriction" from GCE that comes from "normal file systems don't like this". Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud, but I'm not a filesystem expert.
brianwawok 10y ago
Honestly it is trivial to do a full dump and reload a new instance with a smaller disk. Like 5 minutes and 3 clicks easy.

samhamilton 10y ago

Dear Google, pretty please add some Postgres support

sandGorgon 10y ago
+1 Google almost seems deliberately adamant in not wanting to do anything with postures.
- boulos 10y ago
  Nope, but samhamilton has it right. Getting this in place was really the first step. While I personally like Postgres myself, it's still the case that MySQL dominates in terms of install base and dollars.
theDoug 10y ago
Already available if you wanna spin up your own GCE: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres Or! Through the Launcher for about $5/month to start https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-launchpad/postgresql?q=postg&project=no-idea-what-project https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la... I can imagine with time we see it make an appearance as a managed service, like the other databases, as well.
- samhamilton 10y ago
  Yep - currently rolling my own on GCE but would really love them to roll out managed service to handle failover. Hopefully now that their v2 has gone GA it releases someone to work on adding new db types.
mythz 10y ago
+1 don't see why they're putting in the effort of providing managed SQL Server hosting when PostgreSQL still needs doing.
- numbsafari 10y ago

jjnoakes 10y ago

I've noticed what I will call inconsistencies with some of Google's free products. I see see space taken up in my drive account by pictures but I can't find them in my Google pictures, drive, hangouts, Picasa Web albums, nowhere. I also see things via the drive API that were shared with me long ago, but which I can't access (or remove) via the web interface. These don't give me confidence in the overall infrastructure. Has anyone noticed anything similarly disconcerting about their cloud services? Or are those more stable? I'd like to migrate some work to them but I'm justifiably uneasy about what quality to expect. Are things more solid in the paid space?

quwert95 10y ago
>I see see space taken up in my drive account by pictures but I can't find them in my Google pictures, drive, hangouts, Picasa Web albums, nowhere. I ran into a similar issue with Google Drive/Gmail. Have you checked the trash? Things stay in the trash until you delete them (and some Google services are configured to keep things in the trash for up to 30 days for automated pruning). The 'quota' page may help you pinpoint where the space takers are hiding: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  Yep, trash was one of the first things I checked.
deelowe 10y ago
Cloud is a completely different animal from the free stuff.
zatkin 10y ago
I experience the same issue with Apple's Storage mechanism on the iPhone. I have 0 photos, but my Storage/Usage says that I'm using ~100+ MB...
- tomassre 10y ago
  I had this same issue (a while ago). I believe the solution was to turn back on icloud photos and then your photos show up in the photos app where you can delete them, and then turn off icloud photos again (convenient)

ffggvv 10y ago

Why is a business name required?

boulos 10y ago
I'm guessing you're in Europe. First, let me say we're sorry. The explanation unfortunately is VAT collection and reporting, which we don't (currently) do for you. A business is already required to do so, but for individuals would have to do their own / represent that they're doing so. My understanding is that it's also per country, requiring either a per-country holding company or some sort of extra accounting. tl;dr: VAT (and yes we should handle this for you, but don't today). Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud, but I am not a tax lawyer (nor even a lawyer).

a_imho 10y ago

Does Google offer any sensible support though without paying consultant prices? My pain with Google services that it is very rare to have any contact address where you can get more than basic information. No, clicking through a FAQ does not help, not to mention when you are forwarded to out of date pages because Google decided to override your language of choice.

brianwawok 10y ago
If you want free support you generally do the mailing list. The times I have asked I got an exact answer from someone on the team the same day.
manigandham 10y ago
GCP support prices are some of the cheapest for any cloud provider, and access to real engineers.
boulos 10y ago
The Silver (Basic Paid Support) plan at https://cloud.google.com/support https://cloud.google.com/support is $150/month. And sorry about the language issues, we've tried to have lots of translations but got consistent feedback from customers that unless we were going to do an amazing job we should just not bother.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I am a fan, and a user, of Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS: because of extra APIs and services. However I find the price differences for plain VPSs between these platforms and more bare bone VPS providers like OVH and dedicated server providers like Hetzner to be surprising. I understand that sometimes you get what you pay for in reliability, fast networks, etc. but still the price difference is huge. I like having a single large memory, multiple core VPS for fast development and earlier this year I would spin a GCE instance up and down as needed. I transitioned several months ago to an always on large memory OVH VPS, much more convenient. When I need more cores and memory Hetzner has incredible pricing on dedicated servers.

mxuribe 10y ago

This is good news; even if only for upping the competition with azure and aws. The more legitimate options in the cloud that exist for enterprise, etc., the better!

fasterthanlime 10y ago

Sorry to hijack that comment thread but since the Google Cloud team is around, who should I talk to about this? https://github.com/itchio/butler/issues/71 https://github.com/itchio/butler/issues/71 Not seeing anything on the status page nor any outside confirmation, but many independent reports from our users, all in EU pushing to US zones. I'm looking forward to using more Google Cloud services, but unreported (partial) outages are making me wary :(