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

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

#361

Post by jasonlotito »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #133
intellectronica wrote: post #115

Generally, all cloud providers have two ways of engaging with and billing customers. One is using a credit card, which is very easy for getting started. The other one is having an established relationship with a sales / account team and setting up billing by invoice. Smaller companies sometimes don't understand that and stick with credit card billing for too long. Once you move to production and have your own custome…

Ah yes, it was the customer's fault. Stupid customer using method recommended by service provider.

If you are providing someone a service, and you rely on a third party to provide that service, and that third party screws you over, then by extension, you are screwing over your customers.

That is your fault, and your customers have every right to blame you. You are responsible for the due diligence on which providers you use.

Blaming a 3rd party might absolve you of some of the blame, but your still not providing the service you agreed to provide.

And before you try to suggest anything else, the condition here was "having customers you can't let down."

You have customers you can't let down. That's the context.

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

#362

Post by markbnj »

b112 wrote: post #157
belter wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These type of stories, that appear regularly on HN, seem in the vast majority, related to only one specific provider.

Google is just horrible, when it comes to any form of support, paid or not. They make paypal look helpful by comparison. I really can't understand why anyone would use any of their services. Support counts. It's one of the first things I look at, when evaluating any external partner. What does it cost, how long does it take for it to happen, etc? Whatever anyone else says in this thread, that's what you need to deter…

> Google is just horrible, when it comes to any form of support, paid or not. They make paypal look helpful by comparison.

We have been running production on Google Cloud for six years. We are not a large customer: our spend is in the low five figures. We pay for a middle-tier support plan and support has been excellent during this entire period. We very rarely need to take advantage of it, since the underlying systems are extremely stable and almost never cause us any issues (compute engine, GKE, GCS, Memorystore, Firebase, CloudSQL, etc). Just thought casual readers of this thread could use a counterpoint.

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

#363

Post by XCabbage »

intellectronica wrote: post #115

Generally, all cloud providers have two ways of engaging with and billing customers. One is using a credit card, which is very easy for getting started. The other one is having an established relationship with a sales / account team and setting up billing by invoice. Smaller companies sometimes don't understand that and stick with credit card billing for too long. Once you move to production and have your own custome…

How would invoice billing even reduce the risk of this outcome? Surely any system with more manual and asynchronous steps involved is MORE likely to result in Google erroneously claiming you haven't paid, not less? I don't grasp what the logic behind this suggestion is even meant to be.

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

#364

Post by intellectronica »

rfrey wrote: post #335
intellectronica wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know that. Maybe that's the case (I'm sure it happens sometimes), but most likely it isn't.

If you assume, without evidence, that an HN user is lying if they share a story outside your experience -- there is little reason to use HN.

I don't understand why you think that I assume anyone is lying. Nothing I said suggests that.

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

#365

Post by fortran77 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #257
hazbo wrote: post #124

A few years ago I was working at a startup and we had just started moving some stuff over from AWS to GCP. Things were going pretty good with GCP until one day they pulled the plug on everything with no explanation. It turns out that our company credit card details had been fraudulently used without our knowledge. The criminal had decided to use the card to buy Google Ad Words or something like that - this is the sam…

Never mess with Ad Words, that makes the Alphabet Beast angry every time. I've heard the exact same Ad Words story a few times now, someone used their CC or had at one point in the distant past used with Ad Words and the system flagged it. Everything gone with no warning, no explanation and no way to complain. Even getting to the front page of HN didn't work =)

But the person you're replying to didn't use ad words! Someone stole his CC number and used adwords.

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

#366

Post by acheron »

mhoad wrote: post #350
mcv wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can. My takeaway from this discussion is definitely that GCP is only suitable for toy projects, and not for serious production stuff that requires continuity.

This is a fundamentally unserious point unless you want to add more qualifiers. I’m pointing to this as evidence https://cloud.google.com/customers I feel like a lot of the problems that people run into with GCP are avoided with two main components. Number one you should look seriously at the “enterprise” designation for different products and services if you are looking for long term stability and guarantees about t…

No post body was provided.

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

#367

Post by intellectronica »

XCabbage wrote: post #363
intellectronica wrote: post #115

Generally, all cloud providers have two ways of engaging with and billing customers. One is using a credit card, which is very easy for getting started. The other one is having an established relationship with a sales / account team and setting up billing by invoice. Smaller companies sometimes don't understand that and stick with credit card billing for too long. Once you move to production and have your own custome…

How would invoice billing even reduce the risk of this outcome? Surely any system with more manual and asynchronous steps involved is MORE likely to result in Google erroneously claiming you haven't paid, not less? I don't grasp what the logic behind this suggestion is even meant to be.

The invoice itself doesn't solve anything, but it requires a "handshake" step where trust is established with the payer, with the result that things don't just turn off automatically when something goes wrong.

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

#368

Post by _fat_santa »

b112 wrote: post #157
belter wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These type of stories, that appear regularly on HN, seem in the vast majority, related to only one specific provider.

Google is just horrible, when it comes to any form of support, paid or not. They make paypal look helpful by comparison. I really can't understand why anyone would use any of their services. Support counts. It's one of the first things I look at, when evaluating any external partner. What does it cost, how long does it take for it to happen, etc? Whatever anyone else says in this thread, that's what you need to deter…

> I really can't understand why anyone would use any of their services.

I can speak to this because a few months ago when I started a project, I went with Firebase. At the time the rationale was, I need something more complex than Netlify/Vercel, but not AWS that will suck up all my time figuring out IAM roles and other dumb stuff.

It helped speed things up in the prototyping stage, but I will likely move my infra over to AWS soon.

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

#369

Post by oivoodoo_ »

lubien wrote: post #360
oivoodoo_ wrote: post #60

I don't use google ads now because of suspended account for the last 2 years. No luck to get the response about the issue from their support. I would say never use google products. They are not people oriented. They charge for the digital products without having reliable communication. if you want to grow it's definitely better to keep using the other services. I don't recommend anything else but have you heard any c…

Fly.io employee here. Account suspensions are manual. If you have billing issues at most you will be limited on what you can do (deploy, scale...).

exactly. I heard only the good words about fly actually :) You don't break things like google services with their clients.

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

#370

Post by bavell »

andix wrote: post #283
vbezhenar wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google tech is the best. Google invented k8s, their k8s cloud is the best in the world. There's nothing similar to GKE Autopilot. Similar things could be said about some other services. People want the best cloud and they hope that those issues won't affect them.

K8S runs well on all major cloud providers. You can run it on premise without licensing costs quite well (for example k3s, rancher, …). Or fully managed with Open Shift. AWS, Azure and GC are all on the same level. Any of them gives you „the best“ technology.

Last time I used AKS (~1yr ago) it was a joke compared to GKE.
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