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I have full sympathy for the person. Recently there was a news on HN about Google cloud being cheaper by 50% [1]. We must be very much worried about Google's r

by tmptmp 10y ago

I have full sympathy for the person. Recently there was a news on HN about Google cloud being cheaper by 50% [1]. We must be very much worried about Google's record of ill treatment of its users, both paid/free. You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google and that too at a higher up position to be able to get out of such bad situation relatively easily. I had commented there something that I will not repeat here. [2] I hope (I may be a fool to hope so still) this type of frequent bad-light may make Google amend its ways. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994769

egeozcan 10y ago
What I can't understand is, whether the frequency of this happening is increasing or the news of it finding wide coverage. > You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google I personally think that you shouldn't "rely" on any third party for the critical things. The critical things are your competitive advantage and you should be in control of them, right?
- oasisbob 10y ago
  Critical things aren't necessarily your core competencies, nor your market advantages.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    More like having electricity in your main office. You don't necessarily need to own your own power source and battery bank if the reliability of the public grid is good enough for your business. But if the public grid is only 98% reliable, and you need power 99.9% of the year, you do need a hot backup system. Google isn't providing the service that is down for many customers x% of the time, but a service that can fail catastrophically and permanently for x% of customers. As long as anyone can say that a Google robot permanently cut them off from a service that is important to them, without any meaningful recourse, you simply cannot trust Alphabet with critical pieces of your business, even to the extent that you can trust your local power utility to keep the lights on in your office. There are plenty of businesses that can operate without a backup generator. But nobody can trust Google, PayPal, Amazon, Stripe, L4, Square, et al to be their sole service provider for some function critical to the business. Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities, but are neither as trustworthy as nor as reliable as a regular utility. Would you be comfortable buying gas from the gas company if every so often they intentionally burn a customer's house down, then tell any aggrieved survivors to suck it up and get lost?
    - a3n 10y ago
      > Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities, I think those businesses are fighting tooth and nail to not be (seen as) utilities, because they don't want the oversight and regulation of a utility.
      - logfromblammo 10y ago
        They are trying to be de facto utilities without being de jure utilities. All the money and control, none of the responsibilities or regulation.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
calferreira 10y ago
> You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google and that too at a higher up position to be able to get out of such bad situation relatively easily. The question here is what alternatives do you suggest ? Solid, reliable and equivalent solutions.
- tmptmp 10y ago
  Solid, reliable are very desired but you have to also consider, support, trust and control. I know this is difficult and painful but not impossible and really worth. Recent news of gitlab moving out of cloud to own infra is worth looking. These [1,2] are worth looking at. For a start, here is a very brief answer. I'm sorry if it doesn't answer your question neatly. One of my seniors gave me this advice and I am more than indebted for that. For anything (e.g. data, email) you think is critical for you, you should try to host it yourself (on prem or VPS) and (not or) some backup with a company which you trust. e.g. Your email address should be yours, you may still forward lot of your email to gmail but you don't use the gmail address for anything critical. Fastmail for email, backblaze for backup may also be good alternatives. Disclaimer: not affiliated to fastmail/backblaze; though a happy user. The advantage is you get good support from these guys and it's well worth the price. Again it's not simple and one has to do a serious cost/benefit analysis. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5cp9ol/gitlab_moving_away_from_the_cloud/ https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5cp9ol/gitlab_movin...
- samat 10y ago
  I have moved my mail, contacts and calendars to FastMail.com for the exact same reason a few months ago. 50$/year buys me some peace of mind. I use personal domain, so that I am not locked to them in case things go wrong. Currently those guys are just amazing - the have proper iOS push notifications support, for example, which is not present in Gmail (fucking political reasons, I believe).
  - a3n 10y ago
    Same here. And I'm wondering if I really need a smart phone. A feature phone does phone and text, and that's all I mostly use (YMMV).

by tmptmp 10y ago

egeozcan 10y ago

What I can't understand is, whether the frequency of this happening is increasing or the news of it finding wide coverage. > You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google I personally think that you shouldn't "rely" on any third party for the critical things. The critical things are your competitive advantage and you should be in control of them, right?

oasisbob 10y ago
Critical things aren't necessarily your core competencies, nor your market advantages.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  More like having electricity in your main office. You don't necessarily need to own your own power source and battery bank if the reliability of the public grid is good enough for your business. But if the public grid is only 98% reliable, and you need power 99.9% of the year, you do need a hot backup system. Google isn't providing the service that is down for many customers x% of the time, but a service that can fail catastrophically and permanently for x% of customers. As long as anyone can say that a Google robot permanently cut them off from a service that is important to them, without any meaningful recourse, you simply cannot trust Alphabet with critical pieces of your business, even to the extent that you can trust your local power utility to keep the lights on in your office. There are plenty of businesses that can operate without a backup generator. But nobody can trust Google, PayPal, Amazon, Stripe, L4, Square, et al to be their sole service provider for some function critical to the business. Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities, but are neither as trustworthy as nor as reliable as a regular utility. Would you be comfortable buying gas from the gas company if every so often they intentionally burn a customer's house down, then tell any aggrieved survivors to suck it up and get lost?
  - a3n 10y ago
    > Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities, I think those businesses are fighting tooth and nail to not be (seen as) utilities, because they don't want the oversight and regulation of a utility.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      They are trying to be de facto utilities without being de jure utilities. All the money and control, none of the responsibilities or regulation.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

calferreira 10y ago

> You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google and that too at a higher up position to be able to get out of such bad situation relatively easily. The question here is what alternatives do you suggest ? Solid, reliable and equivalent solutions.

tmptmp 10y ago
Solid, reliable are very desired but you have to also consider, support, trust and control. I know this is difficult and painful but not impossible and really worth. Recent news of gitlab moving out of cloud to own infra is worth looking. These [1,2] are worth looking at. For a start, here is a very brief answer. I'm sorry if it doesn't answer your question neatly. One of my seniors gave me this advice and I am more than indebted for that. For anything (e.g. data, email) you think is critical for you, you should try to host it yourself (on prem or VPS) and (not or) some backup with a company which you trust. e.g. Your email address should be yours, you may still forward lot of your email to gmail but you don't use the gmail address for anything critical. Fastmail for email, backblaze for backup may also be good alternatives. Disclaimer: not affiliated to fastmail/backblaze; though a happy user. The advantage is you get good support from these guys and it's well worth the price. Again it's not simple and one has to do a serious cost/benefit analysis. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5cp9ol/gitlab_moving_away_from_the_cloud/ https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5cp9ol/gitlab_movin...
samat 10y ago
I have moved my mail, contacts and calendars to FastMail.com for the exact same reason a few months ago. 50$/year buys me some peace of mind. I use personal domain, so that I am not locked to them in case things go wrong. Currently those guys are just amazing - the have proper iOS push notifications support, for example, which is not present in Gmail (fucking political reasons, I believe).
- a3n 10y ago
  Same here. And I'm wondering if I really need a smart phone. A feature phone does phone and text, and that's all I mostly use (YMMV).