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You make great points. I'm new and can't really speak to your rhetorical question of "what were they thinking?!?" but I do hope for my own job security that sup

by jjjjoe 11y ago

You make great points. I'm new and can't really speak to your rhetorical question of "what were they thinking?!?" but I do hope for my own job security that support isn't an afterthought :-) First, I should point out that what we are talking about here is Google's "Bronze Support." This is similar to Amazon's "Basic Support." In both cases it's not what you should be thinking about if you need a case response time SLA, or the ability to wake up engineers at midnight. If your business depends on any platform provider I really hope you buy a support plan which gets you the ability to talk to support and engineering whenever you need. Google definitely offers these. They start at $150 per month. (https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/) End plug. On StackOverflow: let's stop calling it "support." It's a Q&A site with good SEO. If you have a question which "belongs" there it's a fine place to ask. We're moderating our "go to StackOverflow no matter what" messaging, but I can't see tossing it completely. Anyway, when it comes to free support, I partially agree with your point about a single forum, in that can be confusing. Again, keep an eye on https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/3466163?hl=en&ref_topic=3340599 https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/3466163?hl=en&ref_to... To your point about a single forum for everything, I respectfully disagree. Free-form discussion is different from bug tracking. Highly structured Q&A has a place too. It seems to me that every product should have - a discussion forum where users can discuss the product and raise issues - an issue tracker to collect bug reports and feature requests - a designated place for Q&A On each of those three, support staff and (preferably) engineers should participate daily. I think the situation with Compute Engine is closest to our ideal right now: it has a lively Google Group, actively triaged issue tracker and a sponsored tag on ServerFault (which I hope we can agree is a better destination than StackOverflow)

EugeneOZ 11y ago
> If your business depends on any platform provider I really hope you buy a support plan which gets you the ability to talk to support and engineering whenever you need You can get support in 10 minutes in Linode, without any payments for support. Linode can afford it but Google can't, or don't care.
nulltype 11y ago
While StackOverflow has a number of flaws, it is pretty good for finding things that I'm looking for. I've definitely found posts from the BigQuery team on there answering my BigQuery questions. As for Google's support plan thing, it might be a little odd that it costs $150 per month, but if you're spending any significant money GCP, it's well worth it. The support response times even at the lowest level are pretty good and they sometimes fix bugs. Of course, I think if Google employees use GCP internally, it will improve at a much faster rate.

by jjjjoe 11y ago

EugeneOZ 11y ago

> If your business depends on any platform provider I really hope you buy a support plan which gets you the ability to talk to support and engineering whenever you need You can get support in 10 minutes in Linode, without any payments for support. Linode can afford it but Google can't, or don't care.

nulltype 11y ago

While StackOverflow has a number of flaws, it is pretty good for finding things that I'm looking for. I've definitely found posts from the BigQuery team on there answering my BigQuery questions. As for Google's support plan thing, it might be a little odd that it costs $150 per month, but if you're spending any significant money GCP, it's well worth it. The support response times even at the lowest level are pretty good and they sometimes fix bugs. Of course, I think if Google employees use GCP internally, it will improve at a much faster rate.