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Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

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Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#181

Post by harry8 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #180
harry8 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk like google pay less in lobbying cash than an individual citizen. Google could refuse and take that s&^t to the supreme court while funding the opponent of every politician who took them on for it. That's what they do to ensure they're not getting broken up like a monopoly should be, after all. But yeah the latter is their profit, the former is merely the right thing to do. They're motivated to enhance their…

A) SCOTUS would tell them to file the damn paperwork. Patriot Act has been challenged several times; it's well-crafted to be in compliance with the Constitution. B) Google already has a PAC but PACs aren't votes, though the cynics would claim otherwise. If people want to repeal any part of the Patriot Act, they need to make it an issue. The kind of issue that shows up on the news. C) It's hard to get purchase on chan…

A) you don't speak for the supreme court. But sure, that can be like, your opinion.

B) The WHOLE purpose of a PAC is to galvanise public opinion in ways that suit the donor and obfuscate and de-amplify things that don't. This incredible government overreach is not an issue for google's vast spending in washington. Why? Because it's your fault and if you cared you could move the needle and get it repealed? Seriously, come on. You can't fight google and if you try you'd need a google sized budget to garner support! There's cynical and there's wilfully naive and sometimes, maybe deliberately disingenuous.

> C) It's hard to get purchase on changing this because know-your-customer is... Kind of a good requirement actually? Anonymity in business enables all manner of lawbreaking; sunlight is the best disinfectant, etc.

Yet they skipped the requirements when signing up customers, deliberately, by policy. Lower friction. Get them in first for sure! "It's so easy, just go!" The bait. Then came the switch, the outages and "It's not our fault it's the law" The law which IS unconstitutional and which hasn't changed between the bait and the switch. Google support clearly sucks very, very hard and it's not easy at all.

I wonder if one day we'll look back at "cloud" and think, "what the actual fudge? How?"

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#182

Post by apple4ever »

pirsquare wrote: post #7

Hi everyone, I'm the customer in this case. Wanted to let everyone know that this sort of abrupt suspension for production apps has been a recurring issue that has happened time and again with Google Clown Platform. Similar horror stories: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33737577 ----- [Update 1] Yes I agree I have some fault for the initial suspension, but that's no…

If you have any fault it's very tiny. Those type of "important" emails are too common. And no warning is ridiculous too.

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#183

Post by apple4ever »

oliwarner wrote: post #77

It's a shame the industry can't agree on a basic SLA: - Solicit a hard limit when you open an account. People can only afford so much, don't bankrupt them. - As soon as we see your account heading for a 10,000% increase on last month, we'll send a SMS, GIVE YOU A PHONE CALL, even send a letter and confirm everything is okay. - If you're about to trigger a suspension, we'll send you an automated SMS, and if you're a p…

That's the human and courtesy way of doing it. Not sure why it's so hard.

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#184

Post by shadowgovt »

harry8 wrote: post #181
shadowgovt wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) SCOTUS would tell them to file the damn paperwork. Patriot Act has been challenged several times; it's well-crafted to be in compliance with the Constitution. B) Google already has a PAC but PACs aren't votes, though the cynics would claim otherwise. If people want to repeal any part of the Patriot Act, they need to make it an issue. The kind of issue that shows up on the news. C) It's hard to get purchase on chan…

A) you don't speak for the supreme court. But sure, that can be like, your opinion. B) The WHOLE purpose of a PAC is to galvanise public opinion in ways that suit the donor and obfuscate and de-amplify things that don't. This incredible government overreach is not an issue for google's vast spending in washington. Why? Because it's your fault and if you cared you could move the needle and get it repealed? Seriously,…

A) No doubt; I'm just a pundit. All we can do is guess based on past rulings, like the one where they upheld prevention of material support for terrorists, expert advice, or assistance (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/politics/22scotus.html...). Of course, they also overturned an instance where police tracking-bugged a suspect's vehicle without their consent. I assume "filing paperwork disclosing who you're doing business with" leans closer to preventing the former than doing the latter, but reasonable folks can disagree.

B) You can't fight Google with that attitude, no. ;)

... but to be less flip: You're not fighting Google. Google isn't using its PAC to advocate for KYC law. So I'm not sure what you're arguing for here. If you think Google should change their behavior, the way to act on that opinion would be to... Organize Google users to put pressure on the company. So, power's back in our court again.

> I wonder if wone day we'll look back at "cloud" and think, "what the actual fudge? How?"

Oh, that I can help with. Maintaining one's own prem for anything that gets to be maintain-one's-own-prem-size is much worse. I've carried a pager for a cloud service, but I've never piled into the car at 2AM to drive half a state over to unlock my rented cage in a shared space with a physical link to a heavy-traffic backbone so I could power-cycle a machine. Nor have I put out a physical fire in a machine room, had a power supply blow up in my face, or driven up and down and up and down dirt roads to find the place where my fiber link is down because someone thought it'd be funny to take a shotgun to a junction box.

A lot of folks who ask "why Cloud" have nearly zero experience with what came before.

(TBF, for small businesses you can maybe handle your load with a few servers under a desk. Many people in this topic have explained how that goes though, and customers expect five-nines uptime these days.)

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#185

Post by harry8 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #184
harry8 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A) you don't speak for the supreme court. But sure, that can be like, your opinion. B) The WHOLE purpose of a PAC is to galvanise public opinion in ways that suit the donor and obfuscate and de-amplify things that don't. This incredible government overreach is not an issue for google's vast spending in washington. Why? Because it's your fault and if you cared you could move the needle and get it repealed? Seriously,…

A) No doubt; I'm just a pundit. All we can do is guess based on past rulings, like the one where they upheld prevention of material support for terrorists, expert advice, or assistance ( https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/politics/22scotus.html... ). Of course, they also overturned an instance where police tracking-bugged a suspect's vehicle without their consent. I assume "filing paperwork disclosing who you're d…

Dunno how this happened but you and I are having two completely different conversations.

Best.

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#186

Post by midoridensha »

asplake wrote: post #121
coldpie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That all sounds like it costs money. This is a capitalist society: companies operating correctly should provide as little service as possible for as much money as possible. Nothing you suggest aligns with that goal: -A hard limit? Why limit your income to $600 when your customers can accidentally rack up a $6000 bill? You can even be magnanimous and negotiate it down to a $2000 bill and everyone's happy. -Why would w…

Just give us the option to pay. Some might call it an insurance premium. (And yes my satire detector is triggered, though one can never be sure)

The problem is that, very likely, there are decision-makers at these companies that have exactly this reasoning about problems like this.

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#187

Post by midoridensha »

Aromasin wrote: post #66
f0e4c2f7 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is when something goes wrong at AWS someone picks up the phone, fixes your stuff, apologizes profusely, and give you a credit. Mutlicloud is great but somewhat complicated to setup correctly. The value add of AWS is that Amazon has unusually good customer service.

It's, to some degree, built into the ethos of the company. Jeff Bezos' "customer obsession" mantra is quoted by professors in every MBA program from Arizona to Zagreb. Case-in-point, here's a compilation of him expressing it from 1999 to 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIrhVU04GHc Amazon may not be particularly customer centric in terms of the products they allow on their market place, or AWS by the plate of sp…

I guess there's basically 3 approaches to customer service:

1. Excellent customer service, that tries to make the customer as happy as possible, within reason.

Amazon seems to be the big example of this one.

2. Terrible customer service, that has a hostile attitude towards the customer.

I'm not sure who's a good example here. Comcast?

3. Non-existent customer service.

This approach has been made famous by Google.

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#188

Post by Aromasin »

midoridensha wrote: post #187
Aromasin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's, to some degree, built into the ethos of the company. Jeff Bezos' "customer obsession" mantra is quoted by professors in every MBA program from Arizona to Zagreb. Case-in-point, here's a compilation of him expressing it from 1999 to 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIrhVU04GHc Amazon may not be particularly customer centric in terms of the products they allow on their market place, or AWS by the plate of sp…

I guess there's basically 3 approaches to customer service: 1. Excellent customer service, that tries to make the customer as happy as possible, within reason. Amazon seems to be the big example of this one. 2. Terrible customer service, that has a hostile attitude towards the customer. I'm not sure who's a good example here. Comcast? 3. Non-existent customer service. This approach has been made famous by Google.

There's certainly a spot between 1 and 2; one where the customer service that exists is reasonable, but horribly under-funded and under-appreciated by the business. I'd say half of all businesses fall into that bucket.

I know when I call my insurance or bank that I'll mostly get things sorted, however I need to jump through 101 hoops to get to the right person via a automated service. Stop being cheap and just hire some operators to wire you through to the right people. It's not terrible per-se, just some combination of good (helpful customer service reps) and bad (automated operator).

Re: Our production servers were suspended by Google Cloud

#189

Post by vasco »

LeBit wrote: post #176
ChatGTP wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you deploy to Kubernetes it standardizes thee APIs you're using to deploy with quite a lot, then you can move around easier.

I've been trying very hard to sell that idea to my team. But no, they insist on using every product the different cloud providers offers. This, IMO, is a recipe to lock yourself to vendors and make maintenance and interoperability a nightmare. It feels like when devs felt they had to use all the gang of four design patterns.

You need to follow some engineering standard. If your engineering org is not optimising away vendor lockin, blocking someone from using tailored-feature-number-367 is unlikely to have any positive effect and you'll just make everyone move slower. If avoiding vendor lock-in is something the org cares about and is doing properly, yeah sure, enforce it, otherwise I've seen many people fighting windmills on this and bikeshedding about "not getting locked-in" when effectively many other things already lock you into that vendor.
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