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I've been working with people at GCP for months to get the right provisioning for TPUs for my company that spends many millions per year on GPU compute. They t

I've been working with people at GCP for months to get the right provisioning for TPUs for my company that spends many millions per year on GPU compute. They take weeks to respond to anything, they change their minds constantly, you can never trust anything anyone says, their internal communication is a complete disaster, and someone recently told me they outsource a lot of their GCP personnel. We went back to AWS and had a whole fleet of GPUs up and running within the week. This is my 3rd extremely bad experience on Google Cloud. My last unicorn startup had several GCP-caused P0 production issues. They would update something internally with no announcement to customers and our production workloads would completely break out of the blue. It would usually take them days to weeks to fix it even with us spending tens of millions with them and calling support constantly. Everyone at our company was baffled at how bad the experience was compared to every other cloud provider. I would not put anything serious there and I would never partner with GCP again.

shiftpgdn 3y ago
You must not have been spending million per year. A friend's company spends 10 million/year with GCP, which isn't huge, and can have an engineer from any group in a meeting the next day after a high priority issue. How frequently are you engaging your account reps? You should be able to get the ear of a PM within 48 hours in most cases.
- cornel_io 3y ago
  Yeah, I spend a small fraction of that and have found GCP support through our account rep to be extremely good, at least on par with what AWS provides. Maybe the particular rep makes a big difference?
- Palmik 3y ago
  The parent said "my company that spends many millions per year".
  - shiftpgdn 3y ago
    I understand that and am calling that claim into question.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      and the call out turned out to be right. they clarified that they don't spend those millions with Google. So GP was being honest but the skepticism led to an important clarification, because I read it the same way as parent
    - Palmik 3y ago
      I see, my bad!
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    They said that they spend millions per year on GPU compute, not that they spend millions per year with GCP. They later said that they did not spend that money on GCP. That makes sense because GCP doesn't have all that much capacity for scale-out GPU compute (they offer TPUs for that).
    - leetharris 3y ago
      We were trying to get TPUs. We work in audio AI (ASR, TTS, translation, etc). When we saw whisper-jax, we wanted to test the viability of the TPU platform. From our napkin math, the cost/performance ratio seemed great as they always mention on these TPU blog posts. I posted this in another comment, but the default provisioning for V4 and V5 TPUs is ZERO. They don't tell you this anywhere. So when we'd try to allocate V5 TPUs on our GCP account, it would just fail with a generic error and a huge error number that led to nothing in a search. So I reach out to our GCP rep we had been working with. After about 10 days and 3 follow-up emails/calls that went unanswered, she replies, "you have to fill out this form." I click on it and it's a Google Form. The same type of Google Form you and I can make. I submit it. To this day I have heard nothing back. I reach out to various executives at GCP we had been talking with. They said, "you have to fill out a form." I tell them we did, and they say, "oh, it's usually pretty fast." I heard this so many times from so many people. It seems that not a single person who actually works in sales or account management knows how this process works. When I finally got a response, they told me that "my account has no billing account associated with it." I showed them yes we do, they replied that they were trying to provision for the wrong account. It took another couple weeks to get a follow-up response. Luckily they eventually connected us with one of their partnered consultants who was finally able to help us, but by then we just decided to go back to GPUs on other platforms because it was such a miserable experience and in that time, all of our providers came through with the volume we needed.
- leetharris 3y ago
  We were trying to move to their platform because we needed high-scale TPU or GPU compute. We were not existing customers. We currently spend all those millions elsewhere (AWS, LambdaLabs, Coreweave, and many more) and will continue to do so. At my previous company, we even had an announced partnership with Google and did lots of co-marketing. That doesn't mean much when a GCP engineer changes something in GCP and breaks your production. I wish it worked out. I liked working in GCP outside of these problems. I really like GKE.
  - WendyTheWillow 3y ago
    FWIW, my experience in AWS, as far as "engineer changes something and breaks your production," is not without its own set of issues. Perhaps the AWS version of this story hasn't impacted you, but AWS also constantly tweaks its services, sometimes to the detriment of its users.
    - belter 3y ago
      References please.
      - matthewcford 3y ago
        I've seen issues with RDS after an update. We were seeing CPU max out; adding more readers didn't help, and in the end, we had to rebuild the entire cluster. This somehow fixed the issue, and CPU use returned to normal levels; we didn't make any code changes to the app.
      - WendyTheWillow 3y ago
        You want me to provide references for my personal experience?
        belter 3y ago
        Not necessarily. I would like examples of where "...AWS also constantly tweaks its services, sometimes to the detriment of its users..." so I can be better informed, and make better decisions within my projects.
- usmannk 3y ago
  I used to work on cloud infra at an org that spent many millions on GCP (I'm certain ~everyone reading this comment would recognize it by name) and was working on adding more zeros to that number. We spent years working on this and still ended up switching to AWS in the end, largely because of support but also GCP's anti-customer business practices in general. We had weekly meetings with our account reps in person at our office but even they weren't able to get things done internally. No fault of their own though!
barapa 3y ago
We've spent much less than this and our support has been excellent.
MPSimmons 3y ago
I was much more impressed with Google before I started working with them when I was at my last company. It was a large software/service agreement with a team "dedicated" to us, and ... yeah, we ended up writing it and bringing it in-house, the response time was so bad.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I am surprised that they could have you up and running so fast. Giventhe worldwide shortage of AI compute, and extreme demand, How is Amazon able to onboard new clients and have fleets of GPUs ready to go? Does Azure/AWS/Google have a huge collection of AI compute that is just waiting? Are these machines just the ones running the custom Amazon or Google accelerator chips?
- leetharris 3y ago
  There's a surprising amount of A100s available right now, everyone wants H100s very badly. Those are still really hard to find. We also need GPUs for two things: training and inference. Our training needs a bunch of A100/H100 or large TPU nodes. But our final models are all pretty small (we're in ASR, TTS, translation, etc) relative to most commercial LLMs. So we run a large amount of inference on GPUs like T4s, L4s, etc that are much easier to obtain. Our intent was to try to find a unified, scalable platform that we could train/infer on that didn't have the cold boot problem AWS GPU instances have when our inference needs go beyond our dedicated hardware. With AWS the P99 cold boot times were over 5 minutes which means we'd have to queue inference and we'd end up paying for 5 extra minutes of GPU time. This isn't that big of a deal, but when you're spinning thousands of GPUs up and down it adds up to a ton of money every month. Since our models require a lot less kernels than a lot of modern LLMs, TPUs seemed like a really good fit. But after dealing with GCP the last few months we abandoned our plans to port our model to JAX and decided to stick with GPUs for now.
htrp 3y ago
GCP's support in a nutshell Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem. We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year. Please go fuck yourself, Google Cloud Platform Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
holografix 3y ago
If you’re spending millions with GCP you obviously have premium support and quite likely a dedicated technical account manager. Whilst free GCP support is utter rubbish you will get several Googglers including direct line of comms to product management if you’re spending that much. I don’t believe your claims
- leetharris 3y ago
  My current company is not spending millions with GCP, but we were trying to. We spend a lot on GPUs across AWS, Lambda Labs, and colo data centers. At my previous company we had dedicated account managers of course. You are completely correct that we had line of communication to engineers working on the problem. That just doesn't mean very much when they don't know how to fix the problem quickly. At that company we were multi-cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Rackspace, Hetzner) and had even more workloads on AWS. Never had a problem as bad as the problems we had on GCP.
- leetharris 3y ago
  I should also add that the default provisioning for newer generation TPUs is ZERO, despite it not saying this anywhere on the sales pages. We had to dig deep to find this out. How do you get access? Not by talking to anyone at Google, but by filling out a Google Form. Yes, a Google Form. I spent many hours talking to everyone from support to executives at GCP. This is not an exaggeration. They all told me to fill out "the form." They said it "usually goes pretty fast." They don't even know the people or the department who approves it. It took us months to get provisioned. By that time my company completely lost interest as we cannot move that slow in the most competitive space in technological history. Also one last thing, we never even got notified once we were provisioned! There's no response to your form, you just have to keep checking. Just absolutely wild amateur stuff.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Lots of things start out as a form with a human on each end. Before long, one or other side of the form automates stuff using scripts. Before long, the form is the 'API', but both sides are using automation and the Google Forms backend is starting to rate limit responses and someone is forced to develop a proper API, try to track down all the form users, and try to persuade them all to migrate to the new API. Busywork.
choppaface 3y ago
Same poor experience in two independent contracts that were as large or larger. Google culture is just flatly against customer service. When it comes to Google Cloud, sorry you’re just too dumb to understand the beauty of our offerings. And then they admit it will take 6 months to get their internal k8s cluster upgraded.

shiftpgdn 3y ago

You must not have been spending million per year. A friend's company spends 10 million/year with GCP, which isn't huge, and can have an engineer from any group in a meeting the next day after a high priority issue. How frequently are you engaging your account reps? You should be able to get the ear of a PM within 48 hours in most cases.

cornel_io 3y ago
Yeah, I spend a small fraction of that and have found GCP support through our account rep to be extremely good, at least on par with what AWS provides. Maybe the particular rep makes a big difference?
Palmik 3y ago
The parent said "my company that spends many millions per year".
- shiftpgdn 3y ago
  I understand that and am calling that claim into question.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    and the call out turned out to be right. they clarified that they don't spend those millions with Google. So GP was being honest but the skepticism led to an important clarification, because I read it the same way as parent
  - Palmik 3y ago
    I see, my bad!
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  They said that they spend millions per year on GPU compute, not that they spend millions per year with GCP. They later said that they did not spend that money on GCP. That makes sense because GCP doesn't have all that much capacity for scale-out GPU compute (they offer TPUs for that).
  - leetharris 3y ago
    We were trying to get TPUs. We work in audio AI (ASR, TTS, translation, etc). When we saw whisper-jax, we wanted to test the viability of the TPU platform. From our napkin math, the cost/performance ratio seemed great as they always mention on these TPU blog posts. I posted this in another comment, but the default provisioning for V4 and V5 TPUs is ZERO. They don't tell you this anywhere. So when we'd try to allocate V5 TPUs on our GCP account, it would just fail with a generic error and a huge error number that led to nothing in a search. So I reach out to our GCP rep we had been working with. After about 10 days and 3 follow-up emails/calls that went unanswered, she replies, "you have to fill out this form." I click on it and it's a Google Form. The same type of Google Form you and I can make. I submit it. To this day I have heard nothing back. I reach out to various executives at GCP we had been talking with. They said, "you have to fill out a form." I tell them we did, and they say, "oh, it's usually pretty fast." I heard this so many times from so many people. It seems that not a single person who actually works in sales or account management knows how this process works. When I finally got a response, they told me that "my account has no billing account associated with it." I showed them yes we do, they replied that they were trying to provision for the wrong account. It took another couple weeks to get a follow-up response. Luckily they eventually connected us with one of their partnered consultants who was finally able to help us, but by then we just decided to go back to GPUs on other platforms because it was such a miserable experience and in that time, all of our providers came through with the volume we needed.
leetharris 3y ago
We were trying to move to their platform because we needed high-scale TPU or GPU compute. We were not existing customers. We currently spend all those millions elsewhere (AWS, LambdaLabs, Coreweave, and many more) and will continue to do so. At my previous company, we even had an announced partnership with Google and did lots of co-marketing. That doesn't mean much when a GCP engineer changes something in GCP and breaks your production. I wish it worked out. I liked working in GCP outside of these problems. I really like GKE.
- WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  FWIW, my experience in AWS, as far as "engineer changes something and breaks your production," is not without its own set of issues. Perhaps the AWS version of this story hasn't impacted you, but AWS also constantly tweaks its services, sometimes to the detriment of its users.
  - belter 3y ago
    References please.
    - matthewcford 3y ago
      I've seen issues with RDS after an update. We were seeing CPU max out; adding more readers didn't help, and in the end, we had to rebuild the entire cluster. This somehow fixed the issue, and CPU use returned to normal levels; we didn't make any code changes to the app.
    - WendyTheWillow 3y ago
      You want me to provide references for my personal experience?
      - belter 3y ago
        Not necessarily. I would like examples of where "...AWS also constantly tweaks its services, sometimes to the detriment of its users..." so I can be better informed, and make better decisions within my projects.
usmannk 3y ago
I used to work on cloud infra at an org that spent many millions on GCP (I'm certain ~everyone reading this comment would recognize it by name) and was working on adding more zeros to that number. We spent years working on this and still ended up switching to AWS in the end, largely because of support but also GCP's anti-customer business practices in general. We had weekly meetings with our account reps in person at our office but even they weren't able to get things done internally. No fault of their own though!

barapa 3y ago

We've spent much less than this and our support has been excellent.

MPSimmons 3y ago

I was much more impressed with Google before I started working with them when I was at my last company. It was a large software/service agreement with a team "dedicated" to us, and ... yeah, we ended up writing it and bringing it in-house, the response time was so bad.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I am surprised that they could have you up and running so fast. Giventhe worldwide shortage of AI compute, and extreme demand, How is Amazon able to onboard new clients and have fleets of GPUs ready to go? Does Azure/AWS/Google have a huge collection of AI compute that is just waiting? Are these machines just the ones running the custom Amazon or Google accelerator chips?

leetharris 3y ago
There's a surprising amount of A100s available right now, everyone wants H100s very badly. Those are still really hard to find. We also need GPUs for two things: training and inference. Our training needs a bunch of A100/H100 or large TPU nodes. But our final models are all pretty small (we're in ASR, TTS, translation, etc) relative to most commercial LLMs. So we run a large amount of inference on GPUs like T4s, L4s, etc that are much easier to obtain. Our intent was to try to find a unified, scalable platform that we could train/infer on that didn't have the cold boot problem AWS GPU instances have when our inference needs go beyond our dedicated hardware. With AWS the P99 cold boot times were over 5 minutes which means we'd have to queue inference and we'd end up paying for 5 extra minutes of GPU time. This isn't that big of a deal, but when you're spinning thousands of GPUs up and down it adds up to a ton of money every month. Since our models require a lot less kernels than a lot of modern LLMs, TPUs seemed like a really good fit. But after dealing with GCP the last few months we abandoned our plans to port our model to JAX and decided to stick with GPUs for now.

htrp 3y ago

GCP's support in a nutshell Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem. We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year. Please go fuck yourself, Google Cloud Platform Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

holografix 3y ago

If you’re spending millions with GCP you obviously have premium support and quite likely a dedicated technical account manager. Whilst free GCP support is utter rubbish you will get several Googglers including direct line of comms to product management if you’re spending that much. I don’t believe your claims

leetharris 3y ago
My current company is not spending millions with GCP, but we were trying to. We spend a lot on GPUs across AWS, Lambda Labs, and colo data centers. At my previous company we had dedicated account managers of course. You are completely correct that we had line of communication to engineers working on the problem. That just doesn't mean very much when they don't know how to fix the problem quickly. At that company we were multi-cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Rackspace, Hetzner) and had even more workloads on AWS. Never had a problem as bad as the problems we had on GCP.
leetharris 3y ago
I should also add that the default provisioning for newer generation TPUs is ZERO, despite it not saying this anywhere on the sales pages. We had to dig deep to find this out. How do you get access? Not by talking to anyone at Google, but by filling out a Google Form. Yes, a Google Form. I spent many hours talking to everyone from support to executives at GCP. This is not an exaggeration. They all told me to fill out "the form." They said it "usually goes pretty fast." They don't even know the people or the department who approves it. It took us months to get provisioned. By that time my company completely lost interest as we cannot move that slow in the most competitive space in technological history. Also one last thing, we never even got notified once we were provisioned! There's no response to your form, you just have to keep checking. Just absolutely wild amateur stuff.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Lots of things start out as a form with a human on each end. Before long, one or other side of the form automates stuff using scripts. Before long, the form is the 'API', but both sides are using automation and the Google Forms backend is starting to rate limit responses and someone is forced to develop a proper API, try to track down all the form users, and try to persuade them all to migrate to the new API. Busywork.

choppaface 3y ago

Same poor experience in two independent contracts that were as large or larger. Google culture is just flatly against customer service. When it comes to Google Cloud, sorry you’re just too dumb to understand the beauty of our offerings. And then they admit it will take 6 months to get their internal k8s cluster upgraded.