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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 utte

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.

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.