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Slightly unrelated, but since there seems to be some Google Cloud people in this thread: I see that Google Cloud account is linked to my Google Account. What ha

• halite 10y ago
  I don't think that should be a concern as both providers in theory can block or suspend your account. Maybe use a separate account for Google cloud for running world-changing-billion-user app.
• gist 10y ago
  This is a great question. Common sense wise to me it's an issue. And given how large a company google is I don't think it even matters what the google cloud people who might respond say. It makes sense to simply isolate things like this.
  • robalfonso 10y ago
    Slightly related - had a AWS account, the account tied to it was for business use only - at some point I had credits/balance on the business account and someone gained access to the regular amazon account and bought some digital goods, so I notified amazon. They locked the account AND locked me out of AWS. This particular account was not important, but it took weeks to get access back. I finally had to call my rep at AWS and said - you are putting your business with us in jeopardy (On other accounts that we spend significant money on) because its taken me so long to resolve this. Got it unlocked in 24 hours, but the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. I suspect Google WILL have this issue as well, it has the potential to be a huge issue for your business. Alternatively never had this issue when I've COLO'd - food for thought.
    • gist 10y ago
      > Alternatively never had this issue when I've COLO'd Taking it one step further in precaution (and from experience): We have some servers colo'd at a small datacenter. We use it strictly for our operating website and don't put anything for customers in that data center at all even though it would be convenient and save money. The reason is we don't want any bad actors that we might have as customers potentially impacting our main operations. This is in addition to vetting customers as well actually.
• xapata 10y ago
  You should use separate accounts for a business. If you want to sell someday, you'll be glad that you don't need to go through your accounts and delete 35k personal emails.
  • eightysixfour 10y ago
    Can't you add another admin email, log in to that, and remove your own? I don't use GCE so I'm asking seriously.
    • sirn 10y ago
      You can actually do this by assigning another email as project owner.
    • xapata 10y ago
      A buyer might pay more if they were confident you included all relevant information, including communication history.
  • sirn 10y ago
    Yes, I agree that I should have a separate account for business. But my concern was that Google has a lot of products and services that I'm not sure where I might tripped the trigger that got my account suspended. For example, if my business email were hosted with G Suite, and my admin G Suite account got suspended for some random reason.
    • Fiahil 10y ago
      Making separate accounts might not be enough considering they allegedly banned accounts related to each others by recovery address. Why would you think they would not do the same with accounts sharing occasionally the same laptop, the same ip address, and the same first and last name ? To my knowledge there is nothing preventing an automated banning machine to start firing at random on someone's accounts. And since, it appears, you have absolutely no recourse (except having friends working at google), and they are not held accountable for these "false positives"... You better start planning for it.
• nkw 10y ago
  As someone whose google account is tied to a scary number of services, e.g. our company's G Suite, Fiber, Music, Play, Store, Cast/Home, Nest, Adwords, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, etc., and is in the process of migrating a bunch (but not by google standards) of data and instances from AWS to Google Cloud the thought that some screwup in some random service gets my account obliterated and my company loses access to our Google Cloud resources (because I'm the admin account) scares the !*^%# out of me.
  • user5994461 10y ago
    Trust me. Single sign on is awesome. You WANT to have single account to manage all of that, and you should enable two factor authentication on it. The alternative implying 100 separate accounts is so much worse.
    • allerhellsten 10y ago
      It's like certificate authorities - it's awesome how easy it makes things if you can trust a single authority. Until the day you realize you can't actually trust it.
    • sathackr 10y ago
      Single sign on = single point of failure.
      • user5994461 10y ago
        Not single sign on = infinite points of failure
        • sathackr 10y ago
          There still are infinite points of failure with SSO. Each service would need a trust relationship established with the SSO provider, any of which is a point of failure.
        • Can_Not 10y ago
• gselva 10y ago
  I am compelled to create a HN account just to relate the below. A year ago while planning to move from AWS to GCE, I created some instances to test under a company email id. Our emails were hosted under google apps. At some point, the email id got deleted for other reasons. I was in for a rude surprise. The instances disappeared, as I found out when the test urls didn't respond. Apparently, GCE deleted the instances without warning. I was later told by support staff that I should add another admin email to prevent mishaps like this. Seriously. Anyway, we use GCE these days along with AWS and I quite like GCE. Of course, we now don't delete any email ids :-)
  • notyourwork 10y ago
    I don't have any experience with GCE but I do have a lot of experience with AWS. What does an email id have to do with your cloud resources? "We now don't delete any email ids" implies you are worried about the same happening again. This makes me wonder why you don't confidently know what an ID is associated with so when you delete you are confident about not breaking anything else.
    • jdironman 10y ago
      I think it could be viewed in a different light. It provides a real sense of control over resources (which should be well documented in the first place). If there are rogue resources and objects being utlized unauthorized in an organization it makes it short work to eliminate such things.
  • jpatokal 10y ago
    Google Cloud Support here. If you create Cloud project with a single owner (email), and that sole owner's account is deleted, the project is considered orphaned and will first be suspended, giving you some time to get touch with us if this was not intended, and then deleted after around 6 weeks. (Most running resources are stopped at suspension, but account data hangs around until deletion.) I know this seems harsh, but there's really not a whole lot of other sensible options. The former owner can't be contacted, since the only email we have for them no longer works, and the project is literally unmaintainable, since nobody has admin rights to it anymore. So TL;DR, for anything remotely important, please assign multiple owners and use role accounts (admin@corp) instead of users (bob@corp).
• timdorr 10y ago
  On GCP, you create a separate Project entity that can have any number of Google Accounts linked to it. In that way, the actions of your personal account don't affect the GCP project (and vice versa). If you're worried about access, you can establish a service account with Owner level access. Or you can add other Google Accounts to the project. (Here are the docs on that: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/overview https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/overview) I personally have all my Google stuff separated into 3 accounts (work, personal email, and personal Google-y things). My work account has access to the projects on GCP, along with some coworkers. That puts up enough of a firewall between various services so that if Google throws down the banhammer, it's not totally game over for me.
  • nkw 10y ago
    > On GCP, you create a separate Project entity that can have any number of Google Accounts linked to it. In that way, the actions of your personal account don't affect the GCP project (and vice versa). My understanding from the recent Pixel-orders-account-banning incidents that Google had nuked even marginally related accounts, including gmail accounts whose only relation was being the recovery e-mail for one of the offending accounts. I just read this in one of the articles, so I don't know if it is true, but if so that seems to devalue the possible solution of just linking a number of different Google accounts to your Google Cloud account with owner access to the project. In fact that might be a larger concern if any one of those accounts raises the ire of whatever Google department does the nuking, they might extend the action to all accounts associated through the Google Cloud project. Hopefully not likely, but this stuff worries me.
  • philiphodgen 10y ago
    Logical self-preservation in action. And it is a telling indictment of the corporate character displayed by Google: - Exploitable for minor personal convenience ("Use Gmail! Use Gcal! Simple and free!") - Not to be trusted under any circumstances with important matters ("We can evaporate your existence from the internet for all practical purposes and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.") Some day, it will become important for us to own our own lives again. And I say this as someone who runs his business on GApps. I'm as guilty as everyone else.
• tmptmp 10y ago
  This. I don't want to end up pleading like a beggar to the google reps (or chase and plead to google employees on endless forums) to enable my sites (or worse, my clients' sites) which are disabled by google because their algorithm detected some "suspicious" activity on my gmail account. With google, you have to be extremely cautious (no pun intended), especially after they have become big. AWS is far more reliable in this sense, and even Azure may seem better.
  • vgt 10y ago
    I'm curious if you speak from experience, or from the one article, where a customer let ports open, his VM was taken over by hackers, and proceeded to DDOS the world :)
• HappyTypist 10y ago
  My Google account got suspended and I wasn't able to log into GCP. Instances kept running but obviously it's a lame duck when I had no management access. Issue resolved with a call to a Googler friend :/
  • mianos 10y ago
    It seems 'having a Google friend to call' being the only way to talk to them comes up often.
    • mbrukman 10y ago
      I am a Google Cloud Platform PM. Googlers are very active in many forums, including HN, Stack Overflow, mailing lists, and other forums, not just via paid support. If a customer is having trouble reaching someone at Google regarding Google Cloud Platform issue, I'm sorry to hear that, and would love to hear what was tried and did not work so we can improve the process, but we are listening and paying attention, and happy to hear constructive criticism. It's definitely NOT the intent that you must personally know someone at Google to resolve an issue with your Google Cloud Platform account.
  • sly010 10y ago
    I know this is an afterthought, but you can create service accounts.
  • mbrukman 10y ago
    I am a Google Cloud PM. Sorry to hear you ran into this issue, and glad that it was resolved. Just curious: did you try any channels of getting in touch with anyone at Google before reaching out to your friend? And if you did, and they did not work, we'd definitely like to know so that we can fix this. We'd certainly like to make it easy for anyone to resolve issues with their GCP accounts easily, without requiring you to have a friend or acquaintance at Google to help fix this.
• on_and_off 10y ago
  That's why like most people publishing an app to the Play Store, I created a separate account just for this purpose. That way even if my account gets nuked for a reason or another, I won't lose half my digital life. same principle for GC.
  • candiodari 10y ago
    Just remember not to put a gmail account as the recovery email for that app store account or you might still get nuked.
• appleflaxen 10y ago
  amen. thank you for raising this point: it is terrifying.
• bhartzer 10y ago
  From what I understand, your google account wouldn't be suspended. It would be the individual services that could be suspended. Like you would still be able to access gmail if your YouTube account was suspended.