371–380 of 531 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Google has some good tech and then most part of the cloud is just years behind. Want an example: you can't configure the gcp docker registry [EDIT: artifact registry] to cleanup images automatically (after a number of days or number of images or anything). This is total standard in AWS and the ticket for this on GCP has been open for many years now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only entities Google doesn't treat like garbage are advertisers. All others are part of the product
Haha, I am an advertiser on Google and trust me, getting hold of someone is like doing a summoning ritual.
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…
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.
That’s why NET30/90/etc exist — without an incentive to pay sooner, invoices will just sit around on the receiver’s books until it’s convenient for them to pay (e.g. to make their financials for a particular quarter look good.)
Invoices under contract law are like PayPal’s arbitration process: “always favours the buyer.” A seller would need an explicit pre-existing contract clause stating a due date for an invoice, in order for a due date declared on an invoice to have any force; by default, it doesn’t. And because invoice billing is something companies tend to offer mostly to companies they’re trying to stay on the good side of, they don’t tend to sit them down for a binding contract negotiation when doing so.
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…
What is this fud? Both AWS and Azure won't suspend your account for several months, even with charges failing. Especially not if you're communicating with them. It's incredibly easy to get a hold of human support in case of the other clouds.
At other companies where we've had an active and involved account rep literally just shot off one email and got back a "no worries, I put a block on the account so it can't be suspended without my approval".
I know in the past I've had personal accounts go a couple months in the red when a card expired and I wasn't staying on top of the emails.
These sorts of things are really only an issue with one specific provider.
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…
For Google a customer is a data point in their machine learning set (hopefully weighted by revenue). The decisions are made by a ML model. If you treat your relationship with Google as such from the beginning, you can extract some value if you use Google for near zero value use cases - spam/marketing emails, disposable non-real time computations, Adwords/AdSense on spammy sites. Not sure if having an Android phone is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are, in Europe, where we have decent regulation and consumer protection with teeth.
I'll buy that when the German auto makers get to pay properly for Dieselgate. Until then, EU regulation will be just a demonstration that money and power still talks just like in the US, the only difference is that Europeans are better at fooling themselves about their moral superiority.
Dieselgate is a case of corruption in Germany, a particularly horrific and embarrassing one sure. But the existence of corruption in a single member state is not sufficient to disregard EU-wide regulatory efforts in a broad swath of consumer-facing industries.
Googler here. I'd like to help. DM me https://twitter.com/david_klanac
Are you someone with authority over Billing, or a nice but powerless employee in a different department?
OP – My offer to help still stands. I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. Sorry doesn't fix it. I realize that. But I want to make it right.