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Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

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21–30 of 152 posts

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#21

This is really sad. I feel bad for you and hope you manage to rebuild your base somewhere else safe - hopefully with technology that you control. You won't be the last person to get screwed over by the callous machinery of dehumanised big-tech (AWS or Microsoft would be no better, sadly I think you are rationalising loss). We must all wake up to just how horribly precarious the lives of ordinary people are against th…

Amazon and Azure have better support for everyday developers, especially around issues like this. Have used all three. It's not just a running joke--Google is culturally allergic to staffing support seriously for anything but ads.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#22

This is really sad. I feel bad for you and hope you manage to rebuild your base somewhere else safe - hopefully with technology that you control. You won't be the last person to get screwed over by the callous machinery of dehumanised big-tech (AWS or Microsoft would be no better, sadly I think you are rationalising loss). We must all wake up to just how horribly precarious the lives of ordinary people are against th…

Microsoft and Amazon both have this amazing feature called “customer service”, and I’ve used them many times. It’s not sexy but it works.

Have the same experience with AWS, the customer service is nice and I always felt like I’m talking to a human and not a bot like with Google. Google is just the worst nightmare for developers

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#23
post #5

It's sad none (I think?) of the big cloud providers doesn't allow for prepaid account, it would solve both "our idiots thought that blocking long-term paying customers with no human intervention is a good idea" and "I woke up this morning with $20k AWS bill" problems

Aws has no provision for shutting stuff down for exceeding a budget (or at least when I ran services there). We would rather reverse your $20k bill and keep you alive. I ate huge write downs from small and big customers accidentally blowing themselves up. I remember on guy almost in tears because he knew he would be fired due to his screw up that blew up the bill. It made me proud to help him. Amazon has a ton of serious issues but they are genuinely incentivized to care about customer problems (I.e., you are paid and promoted on how far you go for customers).

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#24
I had this once with Google Drive, when I forgot to enter my new credit card because the existing one had expired. Took weeks to get my files back. It's like people at Google just wait for shit to happen instead of trying to think of the obvious things that could go wrong beforehand.

That being said, if Google is looking for people to lay off there's some obvious candidates. I would include their mangaers too.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#25
post #8

It seems like a large overhead, but making your app multi-cloud compatible to counter for scenarios such as this might be not be as crazy as it sounds. 99.99% availability doesn't cover for scenarios like this.

I'd just make a backup AWS account with separate billing before I worked on multi-cloud.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#27

Wow I'm really sorry this happened to you. I do believe your conclusions are correct about AWS. Azure generally seems fine too. Google's aversion to customer service makes them extremely dangerous as a cloud provider in my mind. This also goes for other critical business services, like Gsuite (I know! It's convenient). If you have GCP or Gsuite now and you're trying to evaluate how big of a deal it is my suggestion w…

One time I emailed jeff@ and then a few days later someone called to talk to me about my Kindle on Android bug. I got a workaround and it was fixed in the next version.

And I've talked to a support human at Google before, about our GSuite.

Re: Warning – Google suspended GCP services for 'verification', lost my business

#30
Sigh. It's now been [0] days since the last "My [business | e-mail | critical thing] depended entirely on a single service with no backup, I got suspended, and now I can't do my [business | e-mail | critical thing]!" story. I do sympathize, and the right fix is for these services to have better support, but come on... These stories happen so often and get ample press. They should not be surprising. Please stop doing this, people! If something you rely on for your livelihood depends on a single company as a single point of failure, that is a flaming, burning emergency that needs to be solved right now!
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