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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

    Evernote’s engagement with Google engineers was a pleasant surprise to 
    McCormack. The team was available 24/7 to handle Evernote’s concerns 
    remotely, and Google also sent a team of its engineers over to Evernote’s 
    facilities to help with the migration.

    Those Google employees were around to help troubleshoot any technical 
    challenges Evernote was having with the move. That sort of 
    engineer-to-engineer engagement is something Google says is a big part of 
    its approach to service.

It's interesting to read that, given that one of the perennial complaints about GCE on Hacker News is the relative lack of support compared to AWS or Azure. Is it just that when you're a customer that big, even Google is willing to give you personalized service? Or is this a sign of a change in the GCE support model?

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Option 3. This is PR and not a postmortem containing facts you can use to inform your decisions.

I fear there is no journalism here. No attempt to uncover real motivations, nothing remotely negative, no dissenting comment from current/past engineers, nothing about who paid what to whom, the incestuous relationships of ex-Googlers (Evernote CEO is ex-Google), how much Google is losing to take on high profile customers, who is placing these stories or anything other than pushing the narrative that "everybody must move to Google Cloud".

And it's not merely a positive piece; those quoted paragraphs literally read like marketing copy.

Find Evernote's technical take on their series of blog posts:

- https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-se...

I run a service on Firebase (now part of Google Cloud Platform) and ran into problems recently. To my surprise, the support was excellent. And I've only a few thousand users.

As for whether that level of support was acquired with the rest of Firebase or is native to GCE, I don't know.

I think having purchased the highest support configuration and being a big customer will always improve your support situation.

> Or is this a sign of a change in the GCE support model?

It's standard practice for all professional services (not limited to tech or cloud). When you are a major client you always get privileges and custom support.

It's a mix of you pay so much for the service that they can give you some help + it's good for PR and case studies + it helps them to gather feedback on their services.

That's just the way business do business (outside of the 20 years old children at SV companies who are scared to talk to sales guys and support).

I probably helps that the current CTO of Evernote used to work for a higher-up VP in Google Cloud for years when they were with Yahoo and GoDaddy.

Google does not have any engineers in the countries where are company operates or has contractors. Many people on HN are not from the US or not from locations having this option, so most of our judgment comes from using the online help or having a call with Amazon/Google/MS. Based on my experience, I still think Amazon wins. I bet it was really helpful for Evernote to get such a support though.

Where does your company operate, you might be surprised...

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud

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