5 ms·

I wonder if OP paid for Support? https://cloud.google.com/support/?options=premium-support#options https://cloud.google.com/support/?options=premium-support#op.

by sargun 8y ago

I wonder if OP paid for Support? https://cloud.google.com/support/?options=premium-support#options https://cloud.google.com/support/?options=premium-support#op... And had they converted their project to monthly invoicing: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/invoiced-billing https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/invoiced-billin...

lisper 8y ago
What difference does that make? There's no justification for intentionally shutting down a potentially critical service with no warning.
- sargun 8y ago
  IIRC, A couple things: * When you have invoicing setup, the above shouldn't happen. You need to keep a payment method in good standing, but you have something like 10 days to pay your bill. -- They do a little bit more vetting (KYC) on the invoice path, and that effectively gets you out of dodge. * Without paying for premium support, there's effectively no support. I think if someone didn't pay their bill on time, you might shut off their service too, wouldn't you?
  - mikeyr0x 8y ago
    You are correct sir
  - lisper 8y ago
    > if someone didn't pay their bill on time What does that have to do with anything? The account was not shut down for non-payment, it was shut down because of unspecified "suspicious activity." But even in case of non-payment I would not shut down the account without any warning. Not if I wanted to keep my customers.
    - foobarbazetc 8y ago
      Most hosting providers give 72 hours to pay if a method fails. Then they unplug the Ethernet cable and wait a week or two. But as you said, this isn’t about non-payment.
- olefoo 8y ago
  "Oh hey, it looks like $customer suddenly started a bunch of coinminers on their account at 10x their usual usage rate. Perfectly fine. Let them rack up a months billing in a weekend; why not?" A hypothetical but not unheard of scenario in which immediate shutdown might be warranted. It's a rough world and different providers have optimised for different threat models. AWS wants to keep customers hooked; GCP wants to prevent abuse, Digital Ocean wants to show it's as capable as anyone else. If you can afford it, you build resilient multicloud infrastructure. If you can't yet do that; at the very least ensure that you have off-site backups of critical data. Cloud providers are not magic; they can fail in bizarre ways that are difficult to remedy. If you value your company you will ensure that your eggs are replicated to more than one basket and you will test your failover operations regularly. Having every deploy include failing over from one provider to another may or may not fit your comfort level; but it can be done.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > A hypothetical but not unheard of scenario in which immediate shutdown might be warranted. Not without warning, no. It is possible that the customer intended to start a CPU-intensive process and fully intended to pay for it. Send a warning first with a specific description of the "suspicious activity" and give the customer a chance to do something about it. Don't just pull the plug with no warning.
  - halbritt 8y ago
    "If you can afford it" There's a degree of complexity that comes with multi-cloud that's ill-suited for most early stage companies. Especially in the age of "serverless" that has folks thinking they don't need people to worry about infrastructure. My point is that the calculus has more to it than just money. The prudent response, of course, is to do as you described. Have a plan for your provider to go away. Offsite backups and the necessary config management to bring up similar infra in another region/provider is likely sufficient for most.
    - jchanimal 8y ago
      It's hard to get a fully multi-cloud response in a simple stack. I describe one option for a simple multi-cloud stack in this blog post: https://blog.fauna.com/survive-cloud-vendor-crashes-with-netlify-and-faunadb https://blog.fauna.com/survive-cloud-vendor-crashes-with-net...
- ikiris 8y ago
  Yes, there is or they wouldn't turn it off. Companies aren't in the habit of trying not to take your money for services without a pretty damn good reason. And if it was that critical it should have support and a SLA contract, and you know, backups.
  - lisper 8y ago
    Right. Because big companies never ever do anything unjustified. Particularly when they put automatic processes in place with no humans in the loop, because we all know that computers never make mistakes.

by sargun 8y ago

lisper 8y ago

What difference does that make? There's no justification for intentionally shutting down a potentially critical service with no warning.

sargun 8y ago
IIRC, A couple things: * When you have invoicing setup, the above shouldn't happen. You need to keep a payment method in good standing, but you have something like 10 days to pay your bill. -- They do a little bit more vetting (KYC) on the invoice path, and that effectively gets you out of dodge. * Without paying for premium support, there's effectively no support. I think if someone didn't pay their bill on time, you might shut off their service too, wouldn't you?
- mikeyr0x 8y ago
  You are correct sir
- lisper 8y ago
  > if someone didn't pay their bill on time What does that have to do with anything? The account was not shut down for non-payment, it was shut down because of unspecified "suspicious activity." But even in case of non-payment I would not shut down the account without any warning. Not if I wanted to keep my customers.
  - foobarbazetc 8y ago
    Most hosting providers give 72 hours to pay if a method fails. Then they unplug the Ethernet cable and wait a week or two. But as you said, this isn’t about non-payment.
olefoo 8y ago
"Oh hey, it looks like $customer suddenly started a bunch of coinminers on their account at 10x their usual usage rate. Perfectly fine. Let them rack up a months billing in a weekend; why not?" A hypothetical but not unheard of scenario in which immediate shutdown might be warranted. It's a rough world and different providers have optimised for different threat models. AWS wants to keep customers hooked; GCP wants to prevent abuse, Digital Ocean wants to show it's as capable as anyone else. If you can afford it, you build resilient multicloud infrastructure. If you can't yet do that; at the very least ensure that you have off-site backups of critical data. Cloud providers are not magic; they can fail in bizarre ways that are difficult to remedy. If you value your company you will ensure that your eggs are replicated to more than one basket and you will test your failover operations regularly. Having every deploy include failing over from one provider to another may or may not fit your comfort level; but it can be done.
- lisper 8y ago
  > A hypothetical but not unheard of scenario in which immediate shutdown might be warranted. Not without warning, no. It is possible that the customer intended to start a CPU-intensive process and fully intended to pay for it. Send a warning first with a specific description of the "suspicious activity" and give the customer a chance to do something about it. Don't just pull the plug with no warning.
- halbritt 8y ago
  "If you can afford it" There's a degree of complexity that comes with multi-cloud that's ill-suited for most early stage companies. Especially in the age of "serverless" that has folks thinking they don't need people to worry about infrastructure. My point is that the calculus has more to it than just money. The prudent response, of course, is to do as you described. Have a plan for your provider to go away. Offsite backups and the necessary config management to bring up similar infra in another region/provider is likely sufficient for most.
  - jchanimal 8y ago
    It's hard to get a fully multi-cloud response in a simple stack. I describe one option for a simple multi-cloud stack in this blog post: https://blog.fauna.com/survive-cloud-vendor-crashes-with-netlify-and-faunadb https://blog.fauna.com/survive-cloud-vendor-crashes-with-net...
ikiris 8y ago
Yes, there is or they wouldn't turn it off. Companies aren't in the habit of trying not to take your money for services without a pretty damn good reason. And if it was that critical it should have support and a SLA contract, and you know, backups.
- lisper 8y ago
  Right. Because big companies never ever do anything unjustified. Particularly when they put automatic processes in place with no humans in the loop, because we all know that computers never make mistakes.