Exactly... People just don't learn. For example currently there is a huge number of companies here in Poland that are migrating all of their cloud apps to GCP (Google cloud) from AWS. Why? Because Google has opened a region in Poland.
AWS has live customer support you can ring (if you pay for it) and frequently as a client you get an account manager you can call in case of trouble and that person has direct access to support teams. These support peoole can actually fix stuff for you. Back in the day I've handled lots of support cases like this.
Google on their website claims they also offer live support, but I read enough stories with headlines like "Google deleted my business overnight and there's no one to talk to" to question it's usefulness. I haven't had a chance to deal with Google's GCP support yet so I don't know how good or bad it might be, but I had a couple of support cases raised for other products (play store, book publishing etc) and it was obvious people that work there can't really do anything if stuff breaks. They're there just for Google to be able to say "we too have live support" and to tell you how to do stuff in lieu of documentation. When stuff breaks... You get an email "we're escalating it _to_developers_" to never hear from them again (or you get an email every month asking you if the issue is still ongoing)
So I think it is the biggest case of "putting all your eggs in one basket" I saw in a while. If anyone has contrary experience of GCP support I'd love to hear it.
While I was always suspicious of using “Google” for any critical business purposes, I have also learnt that “Google” the search engine is different than “Google Cloud” the internal division within “Google” that runs GCP.
I am yet to see any examples of “Google Cloud” shutting down services on their own whim or not providing a human custom service agents.
I've not interacted with GCP support very often, but I have used GCP extensively for the past 3 years coming from an AWS background previously.
All in all it's been a good experience and it's become my favourite cloud. I find the documentation spot on for the most part, and covering things in both approachable language and diving deep where needed.
The IAM system is easy to use, GKE workload identity works great, PubSub works a dream and Big Query is amazing (though pricey!). SDK's are well documented and generally have nice APIs as well.
We've had very little reason to need support, operating a bunch of GKE clusters, VPNs to various partners plenty of databases, buckets, message queues, etc (non trivial setup)
I do have some minor gripes that come to mind:
- Cloud SQL not having a richer API, I'd love to be able to manage postgres permissions by IAM group membership, and grant/revoke postgres roles using the rest API instead of connecting as a postgres user (it'd make secure automation via terraform etc easier if I could lean on IAM)
- VPC peering only allowing "one hop", which necessitates proxies even when using private service connect with two GCP products in some instances (eg: cloud SQL to datastream - why can't we just peer the two Google managed VPCs together? That would also avoid the proxy in our VPC)
- On datastream, why can't I grant a Google managed service account IAM access to postgres instead of configuring a user/pass based user?
- Why can't I configure a longer token expiration for artefact registry? When developing locally I don't want to reauth npm every 30 minutes
- Occasionally missing APIs prevent automation using terraform
So like anything it's not perfect but it also has felt like it's continuously improved overtime so I remain a happy developer
AWS has live customer support you can ring (if you pay for it) and frequently as a client you get an account manager you can call in case of trouble and that person has direct access to support teams. These support peoole can actually fix stuff for you. Back in the day I've handled lots of support cases like this.
Google on their website claims they also offer live support, but I read enough stories with headlines like "Google deleted my business overnight and there's no one to talk to" to question it's usefulness. I haven't had a chance to deal with Google's GCP support yet so I don't know how good or bad it might be, but I had a couple of support cases raised for other products (play store, book publishing etc) and it was obvious people that work there can't really do anything if stuff breaks. They're there just for Google to be able to say "we too have live support" and to tell you how to do stuff in lieu of documentation. When stuff breaks... You get an email "we're escalating it _to_developers_" to never hear from them again (or you get an email every month asking you if the issue is still ongoing)
So I think it is the biggest case of "putting all your eggs in one basket" I saw in a while. If anyone has contrary experience of GCP support I'd love to hear it.