14 ms·

As someone who has been responsible for large cloud budgets, I wonder if Google is aware that their "support strategy" toward both content creators/contractors

by mieko 6y ago

As someone who has been responsible for large cloud budgets, I wonder if Google is aware that their "support strategy" toward both content creators/contractors and customers across the entire brand has completely ruled out GCP for me. GCP might have great support. They may not have automated bots suspending accounts. They might actually follow the DMCA counterclaim process instead of some weird process on top of it. I'll never know: I restrict Google products to casual, throw-away contexts. I've imagined myself trying to explain to my boss or a client "They won't respond" or "They say they can't provide any information." Just typing that freaks me out. Anyway, if you want to be a huge corporation living under one brand umbrella, you've got to take the good with the bad. Google is for entertainment stuff and toys to me.

austinkhale 6y ago
I was involved a bidding war between GCP and AWS where each was offering a healthy six figures in free credits to move our business to their cloud. GCP was offering nearly 3x as many but ultimately I didn’t want to move to a service where there was a chance offerings were going to get the axe with no warning. Their reputation has indeed hurt them — at least in one instance.
- rednerrus 6y ago
  Same in my last role.
- katzgrau 6y ago
  A fair percentage of companies exploring my SaaS company as potential clients are doing so because Google doesn't provide any support / insight for practically any issue they may have.
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    As someone working for one of its competitor, I'm glad that waking up at night and solving a customer's problem (and/or our problem) is helping in a tangible way.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    I work for a company which helps huge enterprises move to the cloud, and we found a lot of places opting for Azure because their experience with GCP support was really bad. These are people paying for the top tier of support too.
- fwip 6y ago
  What services got the axe with no warning? It seems like for all of the Google ex-products I can think of, they gave advance notice of at least a year.
  - vezycash 6y ago
    They are talking about the fear of their account being terminated without warning. Turns out the fear is not unfounded see a confession by an ex GCP Googler: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572131
  - master-litty 6y ago
    The notice of complete retirement is good, it's the notice of deprecation that is poor. We can't reliably tell whether a product will be supported for the next N years. It feels non-deterministic.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    A year is an eternity for a start up. But it is a really short time to a large company with complex integrations, a massive book of work and budgets being trimmed every week.
    - IggleSniggle 6y ago
      Exactly. A year is a blink of an eye for an established company.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    A year isn't much for a non-startup business. Google has also increased prices in the past (maps, kubernetes) while AWS has afaik never increased prices on anything.
  - nimih 6y ago
    I've worked at a couple "mid-sized" financial companies (i.e., not "tech" companies, but with a healthy need for various computer products and services) throughout my career where migration plans from one technology or provider to another were measured in years, and would sometimes get extended to the order of decades for larger migrations (e.g. moving core business functionality off a legacy mainframe system). A year or two notice that you'll need to migrate something important is really not feasible for a lot of businesses who would otherwise be very interested in outsourcing to a cloud provider.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  It's every manager's worst nightmare to be on the other side of Google's legendary wall of silence.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I mean AWS does the same thing - mine crypto using credits to speedrun getting your account terminated. The only difference with GCP is that they have a reputation for this.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    Crypto mining on a free trial is just unethical.
    - nurettin 6y ago
      for(;;); is unethical.
    - maest 6y ago
      This is a question philosophers have struggled with for millennia.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      Regular credits as well. I'm speaking more about when an attacker mines monero on a compromised server, and I wasn't talking about products being axed (but I now realize the OP was).
  - ianai 6y ago
    They likely meant how google axes whole products like aws with no recourse for customers. Amazon probably would not do that to a product like aws in a million years.
- wombatpm 6y ago
  I was part of a focus group a year ago. The general consensus was Google might be great, but everyone felt better about using AWS for real world projects. MS Azure was a close second. Ironic how Google has squandered their goodwill.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Not to heap it on with anecdotes here, but I am also part of this group. I was working with the platform team as part of a marketing tech org that sees half the us pop in monthly visits. We were deciding between signing a long term deal with AWS or GCP. We wanted to use k8s at the time too and even realized that GCP was far superior in this space versus ECS / EKS. However support, and product lifespan was the deciding factors. Similar factors in deciding between Office 365 or GSuite. Different products, same Google story.
osipov 6y ago
Ex-GCP here. Unless you shell out at least $15,000 / mo [1] for a Technical Account Manager (TAM) you are a nobody to Google Cloud. Hence all the bots suspending accounts and scripted processes. If you are a small business, bite the bullet and use AWS. [1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/enterprise-support-for-gcp.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/enterprise-support...
- maxwellg 6y ago
  AWS isn't a bullet to bite
  - pizza234 6y ago
    I suppose he refers to the fact that GCP may be cheaper, therefore AWS may be less desirable on the strictly economical side.
    - liability 6y ago
      Only if you forget to factor potential support problems into your economic analysis. What would your systems being down for a week because Google capriciously shut you down cost you?
  - monoideism 6y ago
    The "bullet" in this analogy is AWS's notoriously high cost.
    - dcanelhas 6y ago
      But which runs on most renewable energy?
      - sascha_sl 6y ago
        The cheapest provider in existence runs on renewables (Hetzner Online). There isn't too much of a difference, especially for EU datacenters as they have a high excess of renewables and the energy market works in a way where you pay for renewables but just as everyone else you'll be using the base capacity generating dirty sources.
shog_hn 6y ago
I'm an independent consultant and have also been involved in large public and hybrid cloud budget decisions between the 3 big players. GCP will never get my backing as long as Youtube continues on it's current path. That is purely from a Google/Alphabet ethics point of view. Don't get me wrong, the other two players are not certainly not perfect either, but they're a farcry better than GCP in my opinion.
- cltby 6y ago
  What reasons do you give your clients for preferring AWS/Azure?
  - kristofferR 6y ago
    Yeah, Amazon aren't exactly good guys either - there's too much to mention really, they're at least as bad as Alphabet. Alphabet doesn't to my knowledge use poverty wages combined with prison like surveillance and massive union busting to prevent employees to be treated as thrash. https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-shocking-911-calls-from-inside-its-warehouses https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-shocking-911-calls-... https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-is-hiring-intelligence-analysts-to-watch-organized-labor-hostile-political-leaders-more/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-is-hiring-intelligence-...
    - bleepblorp 6y ago
      If you're choosing cloud service providers on the basis of corporate ethics, Azure is your best choice at the moment. The optimists would say that's a testament to how much Msft's behavior has improved over the past 30 years; the pessimists would say its an indictment of just how bad Amzn and Goog really are.
umvi 6y ago
Absolutely. AWS or Azure will always trump GCP in my mind because Amazon and Microsoft have shown over the years they care about their customers on most fronts.
busterarm 6y ago
I had just this scenario yesterday where Google ran out of capacity of NVMe-based N1 hosts in a zone. I was forced to upgrade a large number of nodes to N2 hosts, which cost more (despite their claims about them being cheaper -- the sustained use discounts are lower) and are still in Beta. I just wanted info before I started about whether we should expect to be able to even build those hosts that day and they wouldn't give us _anything_. We're not exactly a small company and the amount we're spending with them is large. Their answer was basically either reserve capacity or screw you. I had to relay that to my CTO.
- martin_bech 6y ago
  GCP seems like its run like a hobby project. Scary af
  - busterarm 6y ago
    It's because unlike AWS and Azure, they don't actually use it.
    - nautilus12 6y ago
      That explains everything. Only sell what you yourself would find useful.
      - stainforth 6y ago
        But what about the Scarface rule: "Never get high on your own supply"?
        rexf 6y ago
        The term is dogfooding
        CamperBob2 6y ago
        Good advice if you're selling sketchy street drugs. Not good advice if you're a software/services provider.
GordonS 6y ago
Reading this, I realised I'm also harbouring a negative bias of GCP, (which I've never used) based on my poor experience of Google Adwords.
jrockway 6y ago
I think the important thing is to have a mitigation strategy. Google was very smart in how they commoditized cloud offerings by inventing Kubernetes. You can explode your manifests into GCP, you can explode your manifests into AWS, and it mostly works the same. Obviously you can really screw yourself by not having offsite backups (backup your GCP database into AWS, or vice-versa), or by using their proprietary stuff (Cloud Spanner, AWS Aurora). But if you're careful, you're in control, and the cloud provider is just a commodity that you pick based on price and nothing else. As an application developer, that's a great place to be. (Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.) YouTube creators, however, do not have this luxury. People watch YouTube videos because they happened to be on YouTube and YouTube suggested the video, not because the end user was looking for your videos specifically. Social networks and video sharing sites are appealing to creators because there is the chance that The Algorithm (I hate that term) will award them with eyeballs that they can then sell to advertisers for very little effort. That is something you can't just migrate off of, because there are no competitors. You might convince your Patreon supporters to follow you, but even that is uncertain. I have watched many streamers move off of Twitch because they got a better deal from a competitor, only to watch their viewership drop to nothing until they were able to move back to Twitch. If one of these video sharing sites shuts you down, your career is over. Google kills your GCP account, you can still be a software engineer. So my TL;DR is that cloud computing is very different from being an independent creator. Computers are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't matter which ones you use. But video sharing platforms give you a free audience, and that is something that is very hard to build yourself.
- ISL 6y ago
  Perhaps the mitigation strategy for youtubers is to find something like RSS for video? "Like this video, subscribe, and don't forget to add this channel to your video-RSS feed. Link in the description below." ? Edit: Looks like this functionality already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en Looks like Vimeo does too: https://help.rasa.io/hc/en-us/articles/360045535193-How-to-create-an-rss-feed-for-a-Vimeo-channel https://help.rasa.io/hc/en-us/articles/360045535193-How-to-c...
Thaxll 6y ago
Youtube and GCP are not the same, I mean you woudn't use AWS because your shop on Amazon could be shutdown without warnings?
marcinzm 6y ago
GCP has some nice data and ML tooling I'd like to try but the potential risk just isn't worth it. Inefficiencies and extra costs that are constant I can adjust, budget for and deal with.
Fabricio20 6y ago
The company I work for is currently waiting for a reply from google related to an increase in quotas for google sign-in. The feature has not worked for more than 8 months now, customers complaining and all. We have done everything on our hands (all documentation sent, demo app showing the feature, video explaining all usages, etc..) and it's as good as shouting to the abyss. We were recently evaluating alternative cloud providers (our main one is AWS) and we discarded GCP because of this.
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  I'm curious - what quota for Google Sign-In have to do with GCP ?

by mieko 6y ago

austinkhale 6y ago

I was involved a bidding war between GCP and AWS where each was offering a healthy six figures in free credits to move our business to their cloud. GCP was offering nearly 3x as many but ultimately I didn’t want to move to a service where there was a chance offerings were going to get the axe with no warning. Their reputation has indeed hurt them — at least in one instance.

rednerrus 6y ago
Same in my last role.
katzgrau 6y ago
A fair percentage of companies exploring my SaaS company as potential clients are doing so because Google doesn't provide any support / insight for practically any issue they may have.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  As someone working for one of its competitor, I'm glad that waking up at night and solving a customer's problem (and/or our problem) is helping in a tangible way.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  I work for a company which helps huge enterprises move to the cloud, and we found a lot of places opting for Azure because their experience with GCP support was really bad. These are people paying for the top tier of support too.
fwip 6y ago
What services got the axe with no warning? It seems like for all of the Google ex-products I can think of, they gave advance notice of at least a year.
- vezycash 6y ago
  They are talking about the fear of their account being terminated without warning. Turns out the fear is not unfounded see a confession by an ex GCP Googler: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572131
- master-litty 6y ago
  The notice of complete retirement is good, it's the notice of deprecation that is poor. We can't reliably tell whether a product will be supported for the next N years. It feels non-deterministic.
- cm2187 6y ago
  A year is an eternity for a start up. But it is a really short time to a large company with complex integrations, a massive book of work and budgets being trimmed every week.
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Exactly. A year is a blink of an eye for an established company.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  A year isn't much for a non-startup business. Google has also increased prices in the past (maps, kubernetes) while AWS has afaik never increased prices on anything.
- nimih 6y ago
  I've worked at a couple "mid-sized" financial companies (i.e., not "tech" companies, but with a healthy need for various computer products and services) throughout my career where migration plans from one technology or provider to another were measured in years, and would sometimes get extended to the order of decades for larger migrations (e.g. moving core business functionality off a legacy mainframe system). A year or two notice that you'll need to migrate something important is really not feasible for a lot of businesses who would otherwise be very interested in outsourcing to a cloud provider.
jjoonathan 6y ago
It's every manager's worst nightmare to be on the other side of Google's legendary wall of silence.
judge2020 6y ago
I mean AWS does the same thing - mine crypto using credits to speedrun getting your account terminated. The only difference with GCP is that they have a reputation for this.
- true_religion 6y ago
  Crypto mining on a free trial is just unethical.
  - nurettin 6y ago
    for(;;); is unethical.
  - maest 6y ago
    This is a question philosophers have struggled with for millennia.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Regular credits as well. I'm speaking more about when an attacker mines monero on a compromised server, and I wasn't talking about products being axed (but I now realize the OP was).
- ianai 6y ago
  They likely meant how google axes whole products like aws with no recourse for customers. Amazon probably would not do that to a product like aws in a million years.
wombatpm 6y ago
I was part of a focus group a year ago. The general consensus was Google might be great, but everyone felt better about using AWS for real world projects. MS Azure was a close second. Ironic how Google has squandered their goodwill.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Not to heap it on with anecdotes here, but I am also part of this group. I was working with the platform team as part of a marketing tech org that sees half the us pop in monthly visits. We were deciding between signing a long term deal with AWS or GCP. We wanted to use k8s at the time too and even realized that GCP was far superior in this space versus ECS / EKS. However support, and product lifespan was the deciding factors. Similar factors in deciding between Office 365 or GSuite. Different products, same Google story.

osipov 6y ago

Ex-GCP here. Unless you shell out at least $15,000 / mo [1] for a Technical Account Manager (TAM) you are a nobody to Google Cloud. Hence all the bots suspending accounts and scripted processes. If you are a small business, bite the bullet and use AWS. [1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/enterprise-support-for-gcp.pdf https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/enterprise-support...

maxwellg 6y ago
AWS isn't a bullet to bite
- pizza234 6y ago
  I suppose he refers to the fact that GCP may be cheaper, therefore AWS may be less desirable on the strictly economical side.
  - liability 6y ago
    Only if you forget to factor potential support problems into your economic analysis. What would your systems being down for a week because Google capriciously shut you down cost you?
- monoideism 6y ago
  The "bullet" in this analogy is AWS's notoriously high cost.
  - dcanelhas 6y ago
    But which runs on most renewable energy?
    - sascha_sl 6y ago
      The cheapest provider in existence runs on renewables (Hetzner Online). There isn't too much of a difference, especially for EU datacenters as they have a high excess of renewables and the energy market works in a way where you pay for renewables but just as everyone else you'll be using the base capacity generating dirty sources.

shog_hn 6y ago

I'm an independent consultant and have also been involved in large public and hybrid cloud budget decisions between the 3 big players. GCP will never get my backing as long as Youtube continues on it's current path. That is purely from a Google/Alphabet ethics point of view. Don't get me wrong, the other two players are not certainly not perfect either, but they're a farcry better than GCP in my opinion.

cltby 6y ago
What reasons do you give your clients for preferring AWS/Azure?
- kristofferR 6y ago
  Yeah, Amazon aren't exactly good guys either - there's too much to mention really, they're at least as bad as Alphabet. Alphabet doesn't to my knowledge use poverty wages combined with prison like surveillance and massive union busting to prevent employees to be treated as thrash. https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-shocking-911-calls-from-inside-its-warehouses https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the-shocking-911-calls-... https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-is-hiring-intelligence-analysts-to-watch-organized-labor-hostile-political-leaders-more/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-is-hiring-intelligence-...
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    If you're choosing cloud service providers on the basis of corporate ethics, Azure is your best choice at the moment. The optimists would say that's a testament to how much Msft's behavior has improved over the past 30 years; the pessimists would say its an indictment of just how bad Amzn and Goog really are.

umvi 6y ago

Absolutely. AWS or Azure will always trump GCP in my mind because Amazon and Microsoft have shown over the years they care about their customers on most fronts.

busterarm 6y ago

I had just this scenario yesterday where Google ran out of capacity of NVMe-based N1 hosts in a zone. I was forced to upgrade a large number of nodes to N2 hosts, which cost more (despite their claims about them being cheaper -- the sustained use discounts are lower) and are still in Beta. I just wanted info before I started about whether we should expect to be able to even build those hosts that day and they wouldn't give us _anything_. We're not exactly a small company and the amount we're spending with them is large. Their answer was basically either reserve capacity or screw you. I had to relay that to my CTO.

martin_bech 6y ago
GCP seems like its run like a hobby project. Scary af
- busterarm 6y ago
  It's because unlike AWS and Azure, they don't actually use it.
  - nautilus12 6y ago
    That explains everything. Only sell what you yourself would find useful.
    - stainforth 6y ago
      But what about the Scarface rule: "Never get high on your own supply"?
      - rexf 6y ago
        The term is dogfooding
      - CamperBob2 6y ago
        Good advice if you're selling sketchy street drugs. Not good advice if you're a software/services provider.

GordonS 6y ago

Reading this, I realised I'm also harbouring a negative bias of GCP, (which I've never used) based on my poor experience of Google Adwords.

jrockway 6y ago

I think the important thing is to have a mitigation strategy. Google was very smart in how they commoditized cloud offerings by inventing Kubernetes. You can explode your manifests into GCP, you can explode your manifests into AWS, and it mostly works the same. Obviously you can really screw yourself by not having offsite backups (backup your GCP database into AWS, or vice-versa), or by using their proprietary stuff (Cloud Spanner, AWS Aurora). But if you're careful, you're in control, and the cloud provider is just a commodity that you pick based on price and nothing else. As an application developer, that's a great place to be. (Similarly, I use Gmail for my e-mail, but I control the MX records. So if I get kicked off for whatever reason, I can be back up and running in no time.) YouTube creators, however, do not have this luxury. People watch YouTube videos because they happened to be on YouTube and YouTube suggested the video, not because the end user was looking for your videos specifically. Social networks and video sharing sites are appealing to creators because there is the chance that The Algorithm (I hate that term) will award them with eyeballs that they can then sell to advertisers for very little effort. That is something you can't just migrate off of, because there are no competitors. You might convince your Patreon supporters to follow you, but even that is uncertain. I have watched many streamers move off of Twitch because they got a better deal from a competitor, only to watch their viewership drop to nothing until they were able to move back to Twitch. If one of these video sharing sites shuts you down, your career is over. Google kills your GCP account, you can still be a software engineer. So my TL;DR is that cloud computing is very different from being an independent creator. Computers are a dime a dozen, and it doesn't matter which ones you use. But video sharing platforms give you a free audience, and that is something that is very hard to build yourself.

ISL 6y ago
Perhaps the mitigation strategy for youtubers is to find something like RSS for video? "Like this video, subscribe, and don't forget to add this channel to your video-RSS feed. Link in the description below." ? Edit: Looks like this functionality already exists: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en Looks like Vimeo does too: https://help.rasa.io/hc/en-us/articles/360045535193-How-to-create-an-rss-feed-for-a-Vimeo-channel https://help.rasa.io/hc/en-us/articles/360045535193-How-to-c...

Thaxll 6y ago

Youtube and GCP are not the same, I mean you woudn't use AWS because your shop on Amazon could be shutdown without warnings?

marcinzm 6y ago

GCP has some nice data and ML tooling I'd like to try but the potential risk just isn't worth it. Inefficiencies and extra costs that are constant I can adjust, budget for and deal with.

Fabricio20 6y ago

The company I work for is currently waiting for a reply from google related to an increase in quotas for google sign-in. The feature has not worked for more than 8 months now, customers complaining and all. We have done everything on our hands (all documentation sent, demo app showing the feature, video explaining all usages, etc..) and it's as good as shouting to the abyss. We were recently evaluating alternative cloud providers (our main one is AWS) and we discarded GCP because of this.

drivebycomment 6y ago
I'm curious - what quota for Google Sign-In have to do with GCP ?