4 ms·

I consider him panicking more than shouting and threatening. I couldn't imagine having that kind of treatment as a vps customer else I'll be moving out asap.

meaty 14y ago
If you were a VPS customer, you'd be less locked in and can just walk to another vendor so they actually are shit hot with support usually. It was obvious when I first tried it that GAE has crappy support.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  Migrating is an effort but it is always possible. In fact, when you migrate you realize how independent you are. Even if you use tons of APIs, everybody has 'em even if their interfaces are different.
- jfoster 14y ago
  What are we actually talking about when discussing "good support" and "bad support"? Is it just someone nice to talk to whilst someone else fixes a problem for you? There was an interesting article along these lines by the former President of Enterprise at Google written recently: http://gigaom.com/2013/01/26/the-delusions-that-companies-have-about-the-cloud/ http://gigaom.com/2013/01/26/the-delusions-that-companies-ha... In this case, the GAE feature that underlies this issue is the Master/Slave (MS) datastore. It's been deprecated for ages in favour of the High-Replication Datastore (HRD).
  - jrochkind1 14y ago
    Maybe you don't rationally need someone to talk to when someone is fixing a problem for you -- but I think you need to know that the vendor is _aware_ of the problem, and is working on fixing it. Or you start freaking out. And I don't think that's entirely irrational. This is, among other things, why the 'post mortem' has become somewhat popular -- because it allows us to judge "Yeah, those guys DO know what they're doing, they're on top of things, the chances of outages are getting constantly smaller, not larger." Has Google ever published such a "post-mortem" after an outage? Has Google ever even admitted there was an outage publically? But also, yeah, rational or not, people like to have someone to talk to. In customer service in general, there are many studies showing that customers satisfaction will be higher when they are treated 'nicely' _without a solution_ than when they are treated brusquely but their problem is solved. This is not actually rational, and I'm not saying I'd like vendors to strive towards that model -- but it is apparently human psychology that vendors may want to take account of. On the other hand, Google seems to be doing pretty fine how it is going. Although I don't know how GAE is doing, really, compared to competitors. How Google does it, though, is basically no support at all, right? It's beyond 'good support' or 'bad support' -- with the possible exception of AdWords, is there any Google product where you can ever talk to a human about any support issue at all? For email that might be fine, especially when the email product is pretty darn reliable. For enterprise critical software... it would sure make me nervous.
  - nightpool 14y ago
    There are at least 2 people on HRD that are experiencing this issue too, per TFA
  - pixl97 14y ago
    He falls in to a trap of knowing machine behavior, but not dealing with people behavior. Insanity #2: I need somebody to talk to when a service interruption occurs You hear about an earthquake in California, you call your aunt to make sure she is ok. You are getting bad weather in the area you live, your mom calls and checks on you. The server you use disappears off the internet and your providers status page hasn't been updated for a week, you '...'? When something goes wrong, it's not an event that effects everybody (even if it is), it's an event that effects you. As long as humans are still involved in the purchasing and managing of servers you'll always need someone to call and yell at/be soothed by.
    - jfoster 14y ago
      That's true. I think that his broader point still stands, though. Once you get beyond variants of "are you working on it or do I need to convince you to?" the role of support is basically catering to irrational desires.
blablabla123 14y ago
Because of this I moved away from GAE over a year ago. And not me alone, when GAE was still hot, 2-3 years ago, you could read tons of blog articles with unsatisfied customers. So it doesn't surprise me to read about weird performance degradations. Since years GAE suffers from such problems. Maybe they don't care about small customers and love to hear about them move to Heroku or to good old Virtual Servers. It would be polite to tell upfront though.

meaty 14y ago

If you were a VPS customer, you'd be less locked in and can just walk to another vendor so they actually are shit hot with support usually. It was obvious when I first tried it that GAE has crappy support.

blablabla123 14y ago
Migrating is an effort but it is always possible. In fact, when you migrate you realize how independent you are. Even if you use tons of APIs, everybody has 'em even if their interfaces are different.
jfoster 14y ago
What are we actually talking about when discussing "good support" and "bad support"? Is it just someone nice to talk to whilst someone else fixes a problem for you? There was an interesting article along these lines by the former President of Enterprise at Google written recently: http://gigaom.com/2013/01/26/the-delusions-that-companies-have-about-the-cloud/ http://gigaom.com/2013/01/26/the-delusions-that-companies-ha... In this case, the GAE feature that underlies this issue is the Master/Slave (MS) datastore. It's been deprecated for ages in favour of the High-Replication Datastore (HRD).
- jrochkind1 14y ago
  Maybe you don't rationally need someone to talk to when someone is fixing a problem for you -- but I think you need to know that the vendor is _aware_ of the problem, and is working on fixing it. Or you start freaking out. And I don't think that's entirely irrational. This is, among other things, why the 'post mortem' has become somewhat popular -- because it allows us to judge "Yeah, those guys DO know what they're doing, they're on top of things, the chances of outages are getting constantly smaller, not larger." Has Google ever published such a "post-mortem" after an outage? Has Google ever even admitted there was an outage publically? But also, yeah, rational or not, people like to have someone to talk to. In customer service in general, there are many studies showing that customers satisfaction will be higher when they are treated 'nicely' _without a solution_ than when they are treated brusquely but their problem is solved. This is not actually rational, and I'm not saying I'd like vendors to strive towards that model -- but it is apparently human psychology that vendors may want to take account of. On the other hand, Google seems to be doing pretty fine how it is going. Although I don't know how GAE is doing, really, compared to competitors. How Google does it, though, is basically no support at all, right? It's beyond 'good support' or 'bad support' -- with the possible exception of AdWords, is there any Google product where you can ever talk to a human about any support issue at all? For email that might be fine, especially when the email product is pretty darn reliable. For enterprise critical software... it would sure make me nervous.
- nightpool 14y ago
  There are at least 2 people on HRD that are experiencing this issue too, per TFA
- pixl97 14y ago
  He falls in to a trap of knowing machine behavior, but not dealing with people behavior. Insanity #2: I need somebody to talk to when a service interruption occurs You hear about an earthquake in California, you call your aunt to make sure she is ok. You are getting bad weather in the area you live, your mom calls and checks on you. The server you use disappears off the internet and your providers status page hasn't been updated for a week, you '...'? When something goes wrong, it's not an event that effects everybody (even if it is), it's an event that effects you. As long as humans are still involved in the purchasing and managing of servers you'll always need someone to call and yell at/be soothed by.
  - jfoster 14y ago
    That's true. I think that his broader point still stands, though. Once you get beyond variants of "are you working on it or do I need to convince you to?" the role of support is basically catering to irrational desires.

blablabla123 14y ago

Because of this I moved away from GAE over a year ago. And not me alone, when GAE was still hot, 2-3 years ago, you could read tons of blog articles with unsatisfied customers. So it doesn't surprise me to read about weird performance degradations. Since years GAE suffers from such problems. Maybe they don't care about small customers and love to hear about them move to Heroku or to good old Virtual Servers. It would be polite to tell upfront though.