Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

I totally agree, this is a serious problem. Because even if you understand that they mean “hey it’s Beta but it’s fine for production”, if you choose to use it and it breaks, all blame will point back to you for making an unwise choice.

There is a terrific explanation of the difference between Alpha, Beta, and Stable in the Istio project [0].

Istio was started by GCP, so while this isn’t officially Google’s definition I imagine it’s peobably the same.

It basically says, Beta is mostly usable in production, but things might change in the future that require work from you to upgrade.

[0] https://istio.io/about/feature-stages/

Yep. Firebase + GCP(app engine) is awesome.

This was one heck of a rundown of different GCP options and problems. I haven't used as many services as the OP, but definitely most things that did overlap pretty much echoed my own experience.

Specifically, support and billing.

We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would be surprised if quality was any different.

Regarding billing, we've been going through some kafkaesque cycle there trying to set invoiced billing. I've filled a form on their invoiced billing page, a sales contact talked to me on the phone and I explained everything. She then sent an email asking me to fill another form, which I did, and then got contacted by another billing team who basically sent me to the original page. I explained the situation and they just didn't really seem to care or understand what's going on. They then tried to arrange a call, but missed two schedules that I've set, called the wrong number, wrong country code... Not sure where this phone call would lead. Absolutely mind boggling experience there. Teams don't talk to each other. They send the customer around running in circles. It's amazing that it's happening with one of the most sophisticated companies in the world in the 21st century.

I've not used GCP outside of GCP training courses yet (the quality of these is another matter....), but I did come away thinking the console UX and 'Cloud Shell' thing was absolutely brilliant.

This post was interesting to me as the training course presenters seemed to make out that StackDriver was the best thing since sliced bread, but I guess they have to being Google partners...

> we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP

Google Cloud recently released public beta for Memorystore Redis (https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/) which is a hosted opensource Redis on GCP. It is availabe in europe-west1 region so it might suit your needs.

disclaimer: I am an engineer on Memorystore Redis team.