Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberpanther | Hacker News Reader

The big downside I've found using this a lot in the past is that Google has no SLA for sheets. Sure its Google, so it has high availability but things can quite often fail with no support from Google. So just be careful of building anything mission critical with this. The API can be wonky every once in a while. At one point it even took them like 6 months to fix an issue I had with the Apps Script API. If my business relied on that functionality, I would have been screwed.

The Jupyter Notebook use case sounds great but if you move to something that is more critical use a real data store.

View on HN

Regarding your claim about SLAs - there actually is an SLA for all of the paid Google Cloud products - e.g. the following would apply for GSuite, which covers Google Sheets:

https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056635?hl=en https://gsuite.google.com/terms/reseller_sla.html

If you mean the free products e.g. Google Sheets with a consumer account - AFAIK, there isn't a contractual SLA per-se, but the uptime is pretty good =).

You can also see a status dashboard with historical status here:

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

RSS feed link is at the bottom of that page.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud, on the Drive/Docs/Sheets side of things).

But does that cover the API and if devs break something during a release? That's where I see the problem often. New API gets released that breaks something but the broken thing doesn't get fixed quickly.

Yes, the SLA does cover the API - these fall under the main product.

The status dashboard (https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status) lists what's covered or not covered - table at the top is all covered services (e.g. GMail, Google Drives/Docs/Sheets/Slides, Google+, Google Groups, Hangouts, Calendar etc.)

The table at the bottom lists things that aren't covered (e.g. Blogger, Google Voice, Google Analytics, Google Realtime API) by the SLA.

I believe you can find the list of covered/non-covered service on the support site as well (https://support.google.com/).

And what do you mean by devs break something during the release?

Do you mean if we introduce a bug in the code, and it affects the availability of the API? Yes, that is covered as well.

You mention you've seen this before - I can't promise anything, but if you're hitting any issues here, or roadblocks, and you're a GSuite customer (i.e. you are paying us some kind of money, even if it's $5 a month), I can certainly try looking into it for you - ping me your details and I can reach out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com