News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by umvi on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:24PM (#21815904)
If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'm afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing projects that they don't want to support anymore.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by stoicShell on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:56PM (#21816365)
Google sure is nowhere near as capable or even willing as Microsoft or Amazon; heck even IBM through Red Hat could prove a much better steward for its enterprise customers.

But I think the morality is to never put all your eggs in the same basket, because any of them can fail for external reasons — e.g. horror stories about people locked out of any service because payments failed due to some stupid action by their bank; months to fix issues... don't be that guy/business with a single point of failure.

So, contingency plans, and a healthy distribution of your flows.

Have several banks/cards, several clouds, front load balance with a cross-platform HA solution, then for everything behind peg providers against each other; optimize for cost or convenience or whatever.

This is the resilient way; and possibly even antifragile as you develop new synergies in this meta-space. It also sends a message that interop is value to you, to the market.

When you operate at that level, there may be room for GC in your system — typically where you can afford it to fail / disappear but it's better/cheaper as long as it lives. You're already ready for the day it dies, because you make that risk assessment a parameter in your arch.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by jkeuhlen on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:31PM (#21816018)
The thing that scares me the most, is some automated system deciding that I did something wrong without telling me and banning not only my Google Cloud account but also all of my personal google accounts.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by btown on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:06PM (#21816508)
Or, alternately, some automated system linking personal and work identities, a misunderstanding occurring on a personal side project of any of our developers (say, a misconfigured email send that's flagged as spammy, or someone's personal blog that's hacked and has malware uploaded)... and our entire startup going offline as a result.

It's bad enough that we use G Suite and that's vulnerable to this. But a cloud lockout, with tooling built for a specific cloud, database restores required, etc. would be a whole different level of devastating. I almost have an obligation to shareholders to steer clear of them just because of that.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by res0nat0r on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:08PM (#21817386)
GCP has the same support model as AWS. You don't get to enter cases with either free plan, your support is posting on forums and hoping for answers. If you want to pay then you have different levels of access to varying response times.

The "Google has no support folks which can be reached" for GCP isn't applicable here.

https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-plans

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/plans/

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by eddieh on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:36PM (#21816090)
The headline seems to imply that Google will likely EOL Cloud if they don’t win in 3 years. That doesn’t instill confidence.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by peteretep on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:42PM (#21816180)
A CTO betting the farm on Google’s cloud is displaying reckless naivety. Google’s arrogance towards its customers is legendary.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by bryanlarsen on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:58PM (#21816402)
We're on Google because we're not betting the farm on them or anyone else. Google has the best Kubernetes hosting, but using Kubernetes allows us to move if anything drastic changes.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by kazen44 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @03:55PM (#21818726)
does it though? Kubernetes is a complex system, and many if not most providers have a "okeish" setup at best.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by closeparen on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:55PM (#21816358)
So is a CTO betting on Amazon never turning into Oracle.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by zwily on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:11PM (#21816583)
It’s a game of probabilities, and right now P(Amazon turns into Oracle) < P(Google cancels GCP in 3 years).
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by freehunter on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:42PM (#21817032)
Amazon turning into Oracle is bad but it's a lot less disruptive to a company's operations than GCP shutting down.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by scarface74 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:52PM (#21816312)
This whole idea of basing your entire company’s infrastructure on a non responsive provider is so foreign to me. We have the regular old Business Support Plan with AWS and we can always reach a live person by opening a ticket and starting a live chat. It’s only $100/month minimum or 10% of your monthly spend with discounts. We go through an APN so I doubt we are paying that much even though we are a small company.

All of your vendors are just as responsive.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by brown9-2 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:49PM (#21817119)
We have a similar plan with GCP and honestly the customer support has usually been great.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by tozeur on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:58PM (#21817251)
It’s interesting seeing the rapid turn-around of opinions on HN. Before everyone said GCP offered the best experience and disregarded Azure. Now people bag on GCP and praise AWS and Azure for their customer/service support.

People are quick to grab their pitchforks.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by dalrympm on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:52PM (#21816317)
Having gone through a 6 week long process just to get a working replacement for my Pixel 3, I vowed not to use Google Cloud for fear of a similar opaque customer support experience. I can't fathom the amount of organizational change that would be required to make Google a customer focused organization nor how they could possibly communicate that change to all the people they've burned.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by crazygringo on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:08PM (#21816536)
You're confusing Google customer support for their free consumer products (nonexistent) with support for paid services.

Cloud has extensive support, on par with AWS and Azure.

Google isn't a monolithic entity. It doesn't have a single "culture" of being anti-support. Rather, support policies are tied to individual product areas.

I agree, support may be lacking for the Pixel, certainly nothing anywhere near Apple's excellent support. But again, zero to do with Cloud.

It's literally as silly as saying you won't use AWS because Amazon won't give you a refund on a shirt you ordered.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by unreal37 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:20PM (#21817558)
Oh yeah? I remember a story about GCP shutting down an entire large enterprise customers GCP account and turning off all their services over some minor billing thing.

No notice. No warning. No email or call. Just bam - your infrastructure is offline.

[1] https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-googl...

Now maybe they've gotten better. But this was only a year ago. You have to at least acknowledge that they are quite frequently not at all on par with organizations known for customer service in this time such as Microsoft.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by thesuperbigfrog on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:46PM (#21817073)
Part of Google's problem is that Amazon will give you a refund on a shirt you ordered and then have customer support walk you through setting up AWS services to run your website.

Amazon is obsessively focused on keeping customers happy and will bend over backward to do so. Google does not have a similar reputation or history.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by mark-r on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:28PM (#21817647)
Google is quite the opposite, they only do things that scale. Making customers happy isn't something that scales, so they avoid it actively.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by toast0 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:35PM (#21817737)
A business without happy customers doesn't scale either; I guess that's why they're planning to shut down their cloud business in 2023.

Edit to add: if the customers have a choice. Telecoms do just fine because there's not really an option that will make you happy.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by thesuperbigfrog on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:49PM (#21817915)
>> Making customers happy isn't something that scales

Amazon is able to scale 'making customers happy' fairly well.

It is all about the company's priorities and the direction that the leaders steer the company. Perverse incentives reap perverse rewards.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by mark-r on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:55PM (#21817997)
Sorry, I left out a key part of my argument. Google scales by automating everything they can, keeping people out of the way. Making customers happy isn't something you can automate, it requires the human touch.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by mullingitover on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:18PM (#21816695)
If your company has a widespread perception to have some of the worst support in the industry you have a problem, even if that perception isn't entirely accurate in all cases.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by rurp on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @07:19PM (#21820541)
Any inaccurate perceptions users have are Google's fault anyway. They name every product "Google {{service_name}}" and do nothing to differentiate which services have real support and which ones only let you yell into the void.

The whole point of branding is that people expect similar levels of quality for products under the same brand. Google wants the positive effects of using it's name on everything, but leaves it totally up to the end user to figure out which services will deign to let you speak to a real live human when you run into trouble.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by downerending on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:52PM (#21817163)
That rationale simply doesn't cut it.

Amazon won't cancel my AWS service because they don't like the shirt I ordered.

Having personally lost a Google account, the risk of using them for something business critical seems epic.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by skinkestek on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:52PM (#21817157)
We get good support. But recently I think I have heard about big/huge potential customers of us tell us that they are scared of moving because Google suddenly starts ghosting them.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by fooster on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:10PM (#21817413)
Their support is garbage. Their only answer to getting better support is to get a TAM. Which is completely ridiculous. Plus their SLA isn't worth the paper it is written on. They deny any SLA compensation unless your application is FT over 3 or more AZs.

Garbage.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by btilly on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:51PM (#21817942)
They deny any SLA compensation unless your application is FT over 3 or more AZs.

For what it's worth, the 3 AZs requirement is their internal policy as well, and they intentionally run exercises where they randomly shut down important looking data centers to verify that failover is working correctly.

If you haven't set up your application to continue working if the plug is pulled on the data center, there is a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to intentional action.

To be fair, there is also a non-zero chance that it will be shut down due to other people's actions. My two favorite examples are, "Gypsies stole the cables to the data center so that they could sell the metal in it" and "Hunters used the shiny supports for the cables for target practice." These happened in Eastern Europe and Oregon respectively.

On the flip side, their tools make it really easy to have your software run extremely robustly. Even if Gypsies or hunters attempt to ruin your day.

Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by mehdix on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:52PM (#21817952)
I'm not an Apple dev, but you just reminded me of Apple's excellent support. I got a problem on my development account and immediately received a phone call from a human helping me solving the issue.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by brown9-2 on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:50PM (#21817126)
As someone who actually usually GCP professionally, I’ve never had a problem with their support process.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by osipov on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:54PM (#21817984)
As an Xoogler and someone who used GCP professionally I had numerous issues with their support, especially when helping customers launch brand new projects.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by fooster on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @02:09PM (#21817394)
Their payed support is terrible and getting worse. We've had no end of issues with being told incorrect advice, being advised on how to administer our systems (when its very clear the problem is with the infrastructure). We've had disks corrupted, which is theory impossible. The list goes on and on an on.
Re:Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microso... by thinkingkong on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:56PM (#21816375)
Im also wondering what “best” or “winning” means in this context. Theres no way they’ll surpass AWS in revenue in 3 years so whats the dimension of quality here?