The trouble is that their customer service is terrible.
We reported numerous issues and there was no tracking at all. For one UI bug in their webapp, a PM completely disregarded the reproduction instructions I gave him and made me have a half-hour kong Hangout with a remote engineer to prove the bug existed. The engineer even found more bugs while watching my screen.
The sales engineers (solution consultants?) are rather slimey, especially compared to the PMs who often admit when they don’t know something. This one eng kept pushing Dataflow even after we said no 100 times. It appears Google uses Dataflow / Beam internally now (instead of MapReduce) and so I guess at Google you’re dumb if you’re not doing the “correct” thing.
Also frustrating was how much money we wasted due to things like multi-gpu jobs taking 10-15 minutes to start and their GPU hypervisor pausing the whole system for 10-20 seconds incessantly.
If you use GCE, make sure Google is paying for the bloody edges. Get a ton of credits.
Also DataPrep was amazing until you run the DataFlow pipeline it produces and a < 1TB dataset cleaning costs $25...
Have had good experiences once the data is in bigquery and bq keeps costs low. But lately Ive been trying to figure out a semi-managed way of doing exactly-once stream processing for cheaper than dataflow. Possibly an architecture around cloud run might work.
Do you need to run this pipeline more than once a day? Is it sufficiently important for your business case? I feel like 25 is a very small sum if any of them are remotely true.
On a related note, how practically reliable is the DataPrep->DataFlow workflow? Could a reasonably smart analyst with zero programming experience set them up and run them? Feel like that's who this workflow is built for, but I've not had the best of experiences with Trifacta demos in AWS with reliability.
I agree a warehouse could get more expensive, but that’s where Athena or BigQuery is supposed to come in? BigQuery is rather expensive though. It can’t support reading Parquet natively (of course Google insists on their own format) so you have to pay their heavy tax versus just object storage and elastic compute.
Also the classic BigQuery UI is way less buggy than the new one, and the PMs won’t take bugs for the new UI.
“ Our benchmark results show that Apache Beam has a noticeable impact on the performance of DSPSs in almost all cases. Programs developed using Apache Beam suffered from a slowdown of up to a factor of 58 in the worst case. At the same time, there is one scenario where the query developed using Apache Beam is about as fast as its counterparts using the APIs of the corresponding DSPS. However, for most scenarios we observed a slowdown of at least a factor three.”
I think in general, scaling support for such complex a product that’s constantly changing is really difficult.
In the other corner, I have the dozens and dozens of blog posts from HN front page from people who have gotten shafted by Google "support". And those are just the ones who had their ticket escalated, i.e. got lucky and made it to the front page of HN.
I'm not saying you haven't gotten great support. Hell, there are people out there who are happy with Comcast support. I'm just saying I've read too many horror stories to risk our business.
If I buy something from Microsoft, I can contact Microsoft support. I don't have to roll the dice on it being actually supported by Microsoft, or only supported by other desperate users on an abandoned phpBB somewhere.
To me, the idea of getting good support on any consumer software is laughable, and has no bearing on Google.
Microsoft does offer paid support for Windows.
For example, the person who wrote this book is probably never going to post a complaint on social media:
https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Against-Windows-10-Microsoft-...
Why? Because big-spender enterprise customers demand that vendors implement hand-holding red-carpet VIP support for them; and most of that work is, surprisingly enough, a capital cost, not an operational expense; and so you can free-ride on it as long as it's been set up.
On the other hand, if there is any way to typewise-differentiate you from the big-spender customers, then you'd better believe that they'll have support channels you don't have.
GCP is the absolute worst at human support. Of course you get responses when you pay for support (since you're paying) but even then we've had several instances of refunded support costs because of a lack of reply over their SLA.
This implies that you live/work close to a Google office. Correct?
You can contact Google Cloud. They are very responsive. I'm currently at a small startup using GCP, and I've been at similarly sized startups with equivalent AWS spends. I have found it easier to have serious discussions with GCP, compared to AWS.
We have dedicated GCP contacts. We actually have a Slack channel we share with our dedicated GCP contacts, so we can easily ask questions. Two of my coworkers just got out of a meeting with Google PMs less than an hour ago. Another one will be meeting at a Google office tomorrow. I had a meeting with about a dozen Google engineers and PMs from their database team(s).
Yes, you have to pay for support. They have a couple different support options, depending on your needs. But you have to pay for support with AWS too.
The one bad thing about Google Cloud support is their Level 1 support. It is very easy to submit a support ticket, and they will respond quickly. But if you are highly technical, and know what you are doing, and can research yourself, Level 1 support it nearly useless. They do make it easy to to escalate, with a prominent Escalate button in the ticket. And you can always escalate through your direct contacts (Account Manager, Technical Account Manager, Customer Engineer). But it would be nice if Level 1 could be bypassed, or were more technical. I think they are trying to iterate on the process. They recently started offering to have a video call a lot of the time, which isn't my cup of tea, but I think it is a sign that they are trying to improve the Level 1 support.
If you are using Google Cloud as part of a business, you will be able to contact them. You will probably have an account manager that you can probably meet in person with. If you pay for support you will be able to submit support tickets, real humans will respond, and respond quickly.