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Google Intrusion Detection Problems

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Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#81

Post by Johnny555 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #13
numbsafari wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? I've had similar problems in the past with Amazon shutting down services and providing little to no support to get it remediated. Even after paying for technical support, it was impossible to recover (in our case, it was a billing issue that was entirely Amazon's fault). My general recommendations are: - be sure you have fully scripted your deployment process, - be s…

> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? Nope, and thats why I don't use them. There are situations where they make sense, but people should be much more skeptical about them. I don't have stats, but IME I've yet to see a company that actually saves money by using them. I've seen one company that did save money the first year, but got too addicted to "just spinning another instance up" and stopped optimiz…

Because few companies can own their entire infrastructure? I'd rather restart my server in a different AZ and have Amazon deal with tracking down an intermittent networking issue than to pay a senior network administrator to open a ticket with Cisco and try to replicate it on our lab.

Likewise, I really don't want to pay a power engineer to troubleshoot why our automatic transfer switch failed to transfer after a power failure and it took down our entire datacenter, I'd rather let Amazon deal with that while I failover to my backup servers in another AZ or region.

And my 100mbit ethernet handoff with a DS3 backup doesn't give me much clout with the teleco when the network is down, but AWS's multiple OC-192's (?) gives them a lot more leverage and more redundancy.

Owning your own infrastructure doens't mean that you don't have to deal with a third party provider, but it does ensure that you're caught in the middle of it more often.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#82

Post by Lewisham »

spacehunt wrote: post #77
Lewisham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general. My interactions with Cloud Support on the other side of the fence has led me to believe they are very committed and working very hard. Yes, you have to pay for it. But once you do, regardless of the tier of support, I've seen them work tirelessly and escalate tickets to engineering quickly (order hours, not days) if they couldn't figure it out. I'm looking at th…

> FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general > I think it's doing the Cloud Support people a disservice to call them "disingenuous" The problem is that to us from the outside, they do look the same. In fact, that email in the article, and the subsequent events, are in exactly the same style as the "ban hammer" Play Store publishers get. You really can't blame us (Google's actual paying customers) from equ…

I'm not entirely convinced that people who have a bad experience with Windows support would then assume Azure support was poor, similarly with Amazon and AWS... Why should Google [Product Area X] and Google Cloud be any different?

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#83

Post by [deleted] »

spacehunt wrote: post #77
Lewisham wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general. My interactions with Cloud Support on the other side of the fence has led me to believe they are very committed and working very hard. Yes, you have to pay for it. But once you do, regardless of the tier of support, I've seen them work tirelessly and escalate tickets to engineering quickly (order hours, not days) if they couldn't figure it out. I'm looking at th…

> FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general > I think it's doing the Cloud Support people a disservice to call them "disingenuous" The problem is that to us from the outside, they do look the same. In fact, that email in the article, and the subsequent events, are in exactly the same style as the "ban hammer" Play Store publishers get. You really can't blame us (Google's actual paying customers) from equ…

[deleted]

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#84

Post by zippy786 »

Google, said to have very high hiring bar, yet I've seen more than a few times now that their product lines are sub-par. I'm sure the explanation they give is that we are very big and we can ignore the 1% corner cases and have the mentality that "we are so big we don't really care about smaller parts of the internet".

Also, the hypocrisy in using very logical questions to hire people but not sticking to similar logic in the product line is laughable.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#86

Post by Jordrok »

tlogan wrote: post #51
redstripe wrote: post #12

This is the google M.O. - optimize all processes through cheap machine learning and heuristics and accept that some people will get screwed along the way. The number of people that can be served at very little cost without any human involvement is apparently very lucrative. Google just considers customer service as an archaic relic that predates the invention of behavioral algorithms.

And it works quite well from them. Yes, people on HN and on internet will complain... Also it could be that customer support is just overrated.... The problem is that 95% of support calls / issues are anyway just people complaining about things which are not at all related to the actual Google service. But, on the other hand, hackers which try Google Cloud and are bitten by lack of Google support do have influence on…

Yeah, how dare all those little people complain when they're inadvertently crushed by the glorious Google behemoth. Don't they realize how insignificant they are? Their entire lives are simply rounding errors at Internet Scale.

Sometimes the end result is less important than how you get there, and how you treat the ones who don't fit into your plans. It happens all the time with big companies, but Google even more than most. They KNOW that the potential for problems exists, but so long as it only affects 5%, who cares? Fuck you, got mine.

I think that the attitude conveyed by Google's lack of support is what inspires a lot of people to post rants online, rather than the frequency of incidents.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#87

Post by spacehunt »

Lewisham wrote: post #82
spacehunt wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW Google Cloud Support != Google support in general > I think it's doing the Cloud Support people a disservice to call them "disingenuous" The problem is that to us from the outside, they do look the same. In fact, that email in the article, and the subsequent events, are in exactly the same style as the "ban hammer" Play Store publishers get. You really can't blame us (Google's actual paying customers) from equ…

I'm not entirely convinced that people who have a bad experience with Windows support would then assume Azure support was poor, similarly with Amazon and AWS... Why should Google [Product Area X] and Google Cloud be any different?

Windows and Amazon are consumer facing products. Azure, AWS, Play Store publishing and Google Cloud are all developer facing products.

(And no, I do not equate consumer Windows support with enterprise Windows support either, and as it turns out they are not the same level.)

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#88

Post by CaptSpify »

Johnny555 wrote: post #81
CaptSpify wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? Nope, and thats why I don't use them. There are situations where they make sense, but people should be much more skeptical about them. I don't have stats, but IME I've yet to see a company that actually saves money by using them. I've seen one company that did save money the first year, but got too addicted to "just spinning another instance up" and stopped optimiz…

Because few companies can own their entire infrastructure? I'd rather restart my server in a different AZ and have Amazon deal with tracking down an intermittent networking issue than to pay a senior network administrator to open a ticket with Cisco and try to replicate it on our lab. Likewise, I really don't want to pay a power engineer to troubleshoot why our automatic transfer switch failed to transfer after a pow…

Nobody said it eliminates problems, but moving to the cloud doesnt either, it just hides them away. If that's what you want, that's OK, but at the same time, don't expect much sympathy when you make a blog-post like this and bitch about the lack of transparency on a system you don't manage. You may want to give up control of your infrastructure to someone else, but my personal (not statistical, mind you) experience is that you end up with less control, for more cost.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#89

Post by CaptSpify »

oneloop wrote: post #59
CaptSpify wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I'm not saying hosted solutions are never the answer, they are just less often the answer than people seem to think. Too many people buy into the cloud-hype, and never look at the numbers until it's too late. And that doesn't even touch the trust you have to have in your provider. And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself.

> And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself. Where do you keep the machines? In your bedroom?

Depends if you mean for work or home.

For work, we have a DC. For home, yes, I keep them in my office.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#90

Post by ufmace »

tscanausa wrote: post #22

My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance

Thanks for your help and for responding here, but I hope you guys at Google know that this seems like a major organization-level problem. There's a big perception that Google has no real customer support for anything, even if there's pretty serious amounts of money involved, fueled by a regular drumbeat of blog posts about people who had their entire livelihood shut down for unexplained reasons with no possible recourse. It's kind of like the "five whys" failure analysis. Yes, this particular automated workflow was broken, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is the lack of human support that can turn issues like this from a crisis to a minor hiccup.

It seems like you guys really need to get some call centers filled with people with some level of diagnostic ability and problem-solving authority. Yes, this is expensive and difficult to get built, but if you really want to Reduce Customer Anxiety, nothing can do that like the knowledge that there's a real person available 24/7 who can fix any problems on Google's side. Make it pay per incident or by subscription if needed to keep the jokers out, but anything is a whole lot better than nothing.

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