mikeyr0x

+1!

Hundreds or thousands is easily spent by 'consumers' on any public cloud. Think about it.

Paying bills offline via invoice establishes a enterprise agreement with cloud providers. It does in fact change everything with the issue discussed here. They wouldn't be taken offline due to an issue with the credit card payment.

That is correct. CC billing and individual projects could be consumer level usage. Anyone can signup for this level account and use for whatever purpose. Offline invoicing and G Suite / Organization setup / domain validation / enterprise support could be thought of as enterprise and would come with assurances such as billing payment stability.

You are correct sir

Please remember Google Cloud is a multi-tenant public cloud and in order run a multi-tenant environment providers have to monitor usage, users, billing, and take precautionary measures at times when usage or account activity is sensed to be irregular. Some of this management is done automatically by systems preserving QoS and monitoring for fraud or abuse.

This seems like a billing issue. If they had offline billing and monthly invoicing (enterprise agreement) I do not believe this issue would have happened.

If you are running an enterprise business and do not have enterprise support and an enterprise relationship with the provider, you may be doing something wrong on your end. It sounds like the author of this post does not have an account team and hasn't take the appropriate steps to establish an enterprise relationship with their provider. They are running a consumer account which is fine in many many cases, but may not be fine for a company that requires absolutely no service interruptions.

IMO, the time this issue was resolved by the automated process (20 mins) is not too bad for consumer cloud services. Most likely this issue could have been avoided if the customer had an enterprise relationship (offline billing/invoicing, support, TAM, account flagging, etc, etc) with Google Cloud.