Railway can only share their side of the story,while Google stays silent due to policy constraints.The assymmetry makes it hard to evaluate what actually happened,even if both parties acted correctly.
Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
101–110 of 116 posts
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#102[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shopify has $11 billion dollars in revenue. I assume that buys them at least an email address of a human at Google. Nobody doubts Google's engineering ability. It's their soft skills that are lacking. Google is culturally unable to understand the concept of customers.
Xoogler here. This hits hard; right on the kidney. That is a huge problem at Google: "we're google; we know what you want and need better than you do." That and an unshakable confidence in their own infallibility. When I was there, I remember saying, "we do some cool stuff, but always remember that hubris is the death of empires."
I don't even mind about that. GCP is a perfectly good platform technically, it's ahead of AWS in some areas e.g. for k8s it's widely regarded to be the best.
The product is great. However I have GCP blacklisted because it's basically a vending machine. If your drink gets stuck in a vending machine all you can do is hit it hopelessly.
If I have a problem on AWS I'm fairly sure I can talk to a human and resolve it. As GP mentioned AWS support is pro-active and will even reach out to you of their own initiative. This gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
Amazon understands that cloud services are a trust-based business. Their customers trust them with the power of life or death over their business.
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#104[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#105This is actually scary. If Google can suspend a company like Railway without warning, what chance does a smaller startup have? The lack of any human escalation path at Google Cloud has been a known problem for years. You'd think enterprise customers paying real money would at least get a phone call before getting shut down
Does Google have any customer big enough for it to give a fuck about?
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#106[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#107[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#108I really don't see how they can. The business and usage details of their clients are confidential. We have their word that ToS where violated, I don't really think they should say more. This needs to go to arbitration.
There's a reason we used to have courts with public records. Public records and transparency are a good thing. Binding arbitration has destroyed all of that.
Yes, court would be better, and totally justified here, but that also seems extremely unlikely given the contracts.
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I thought Google would be proper and thus not be infested with these kind of problems that cheaper providers are known for. These sorts of things have happened before with Google and the other expensive providers. Are cheaper providers known for doing this? I would have thought they would be less lively to, as they are smaller and therefore every customer is relatively more important to them, and they are therefore…
> Are cheaper providers known for doing this? I would have thought they would be less lively to, as they are smaller and therefore every customer is relatively more important to them, and they are therefore more likely to check before turning services off. In my experience, the reason they're cheaper is because they offer fewer features (cut down on ongoing expenses) and because they aggressively enforce TOS (the mar…
The very cheapest are on thin margins, so that seems to be as expected, but there are a lot of providers between the very cheapest and the high prices charged by the hyperscalers. Pricing somewhere in between and offering some actual customer service?
Re: Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?
#110It's an especially awkward situation because Railway is a competitor of Google Cloud, with many third parties involved. So, I just think it will take them a little more time to figure out how to message things. To me, what it sounds like is that a Google Cloud system identified Railway as a misbehaving customer. Spam, hackers, that sort of thing. Often this happens for "platform as a service" companies, because Railw…
Railway's system for dealing with hackers is a $5/mo fee gate. Railway plays around vibecoding as they go along, and their tech practices don't inspire confidence either. Unlike other PaaS like Render or Heroku, I doubt Railway has adequate rate-limiting to stop bad apples.
Yeah, and rate-limiting is only one of the things a PaaS needs to handle, to avoid looking like a bad actor to the underlying platform. The trickiest thing to handle is people using your PaaS to host malware, because:
1. There may be no simple rule of thumb like "suddenly using tons of bandwidth"
2. Bad actors can open up so many accounts, you have to close them automatically
3. Malware can infect a good actor, who is unaware or struggling to deal with it