Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#11

Post by superchroma »

Seems like the lesson is that there is no reason to use Google products if you ever expect you will need support in the future, because it is just not there. They evidently don't care enough to work with anyone and their revenue is high enough that customer retention has zero priority for them. This is unsurprising to me as they're an ad company first and foremost. Maybe do it if you know someone inside or are famous on Twitter?

Anyway, people pay a lot of money and just seem to be screwed time and time again.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#12

Post by blind_oracle »

Operyl wrote: post #9
CyberNoodle wrote: post #8

Had a similar experience with GCP. I don’t remember the exactly how, but somehow we ended up with a $0.01 bill. This bill was apparently too small for Google to deduct, instead all our api services were disabled :/

How weird, we get charged 0.01 all the time, and I laugh thinking that it cost them more to charge us a penny than it would've been to just roll it over.

Huh, my Swiss telco operator does not even bill anything less than 3 bucks...

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#15

Post by [deleted] »

ssmw wrote: post #5

I’m sorry but without more context I won’t upvote this. We hear your side of the story but we won’t hear Google’s. You say payments were made and billing cards were valid. Your account wouldn’t be suspended for that. I’m convinced there are important nuances you aren’t mentioning.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#16

Post by lbriner »

Why are you running a business without any Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery? In this case, Google might have screwed up but what about if the account had been hacked, or Google had some big technical problem that killed off the production system for another reason?

We all know it is infuriating and frustrating but that is why you need BC/DR in the first-place.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#18

Post by hericium »

Operyl wrote: post #9
CyberNoodle wrote: post #8

Had a similar experience with GCP. I don’t remember the exactly how, but somehow we ended up with a $0.01 bill. This bill was apparently too small for Google to deduct, instead all our api services were disabled :/

How weird, we get charged 0.01 all the time, and I laugh thinking that it cost them more to charge us a penny than it would've been to just roll it over.

> I laugh thinking that it cost them more to charge us a penny than it would've been to just roll it over

In the long run it's not them covering those costs but you and other customers.

Re: Tell HN: Google Cloud suspended our production projects at 1am on Saturday

#19

Post by piva00 »

lbriner wrote: post #16

Why are you running a business without any Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery? In this case, Google might have screwed up but what about if the account had been hacked, or Google had some big technical problem that killed off the production system for another reason? We all know it is infuriating and frustrating but that is why you need BC/DR in the first-place.

That's great advice that doesn't really cover the core issue here: GCP with a business contract is trusted to not do this, yet they did it. Yes, you can prepare disaster recovery and business continuity procedures, they have a cost and it's not trivial. If you postpone this cost as a technical debt due to an assumption that Google should be trusted to have a business contract with and got burned by Google I do believe it's not the victim's fault.

Your comment sounds a lot more like victim blaming than just a sensible procedure to have in place as much as I agree with the need for BC/DR. BC/DR are not free, paying Google (as they've done) should've been enough for this case.

Post reply on HN