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Comment by ungzd | Hacker News Reader

> AWS Premium Support is mandatory

Is Google Cloud support even acceptable? Google is known for poor or no support for most services.

Google's known for poor or no support on their free services but their paid services often have decent support. Personally, I've found GCP, GSuite, Project Fi, Google Store and Pixel support to all be pretty great but haven't found any support at all for Gmail, YouTube etc.

Google nearly wreaked a business that was making them bank and is now doing 20MM/year without them. Support wouldn't even talk to the founder: https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-penny-hoarder-with-kyle-t...

Hah, Adwords must be an exception then - support is total crap. You're lucky if you get a canned response that doesn't begin to answer your question..

Hmm sounds like you might have to increase your bids.

We already pay around $5 per click - I think that's more than enough! However, it's true our business is tiny compared to that of large corporations - but I don't think that excuses the abysmal 'support' I and others have received from Adwords.

It's a joke... you said that you always get a canned response, didn't you? That's the canned response I always get from them. Doesn't matter what the issue is, raising bids is always the solution.

YouTube red support seems excellent (the one time I used it).

And my father asked support for help with his Google Home routers with a very specific question and support was absolutely phenomenal. No going through lame troubleshooting steps; it was clear we got connected with a well qualified network engineer immediately.

The actual people doing the tier 1 support at Google also got through the Google hiring process. 6 years and 250k on a CS masters from Stanford and they'll set you up helping people with home routers :) it's really not just a meme that Google massively underutilizes their talent.

Actually it's surprisingly good. We use them a lot and even when we were on the silver package (the cheapest) they were pretty quick (under 1 hour for P1 situations [production is impacted]).

Can you help me understand how much you define "a lot"? Is it about 2 tickets a month, or more?

With AWS we do have a direct line to a Technical Account Manager which we utilize for the rare P1 (Prod down) situations. That gets things moving quickly if it wasn't already moving quickly with Support.

Just checked, we're on two tickets a week. Sounds a lot but we push GCE to its limits.

On gold support and P1 there is usually an engineer assigned to the ticket. In many occasions you're talking to the person fixing your problem.

GCE is not perfect and neither is their support. But they do try and even when things go sidewise they take responsibility for it, which didn't happen much with AWS, at least in our case.

You have the same thing for gold and up on GCE. On the rare occasions I have to use it, I get every pennies worth.

Also with P1 issues on GCE most of the time an enginner assigned to the case calls me. I've even spoken directly to the head of google cloud platform via hangouts.

What company do you work for?

Thought I would chime in here since I didn't see anyone comment here about gold. We have GCP gold support. They answer all the questions / issues quickly and there aren't any limits to ticket counts I am aware of. During both the outages we have been affected by (~1.5 hour google load balancer outage, >3 hour bigquery outage) in the past few months, the support feels pretty bad even though there is nothing they can do I guess. However during the bigquery one, it was "outage will have an update by some time". There proceeds to not be some update for well past that time. Also 3 hours later its still we will have an update by some time but no more info when both of these were past SLA. Overall feels good and they answer any weird / general questions too which is nice (although sometimes on every reply they say I am going to close the ticket).

I hear ya.

Check out the postmortem for the BigQuery Streaming API outage [0]. Relevant paragraph:

"Finally, we have received feedback that our communications during the outage left a lot to be desired. We agree with this feedback. While our engineering teams launched an all-hands-on-deck to resolve this issue within minutes of its detection, we did not adequately communicate both the level-of-effort and the steady progress of diagnosis, triage and restoration happening during the incident. We clearly erred in not communicating promptly, crisply and transparently to affected customers during this incident. We will be addressing our communications — for all Google Cloud systems, not just BigQuery — as part of a separate effort, which has already been launched."

(Work on Google Cloud and was on BigQuery team in the past)

[0] https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/bigquery/18022

Whenever I've needed to contact Google support for Gsuite, they've been excellent.

Same here

Support for things like the Nexus devices and anything you can buy on their store is very good.

Also, Google My Business support is also pretty good.

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