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Comment by _wmd | Hacker News Reader

The company's irrevocably ingrained customer support culture will ensure they'll never be a serious AWS competitor, not with all the engineering and money in the world

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All reports indicate that GCP is run very differently from the other products.

They had a rocky start as they were apparently ramping up the support organization, but these days I'm hearing nothing but praise.

They're getting very good at transparency. They have numerous mailing lists [1] ("Google Groups", ugh) for things like product release notes and planned changes. They just opened a public issue tracker [2] that covers the entire Google Cloud Platform.

If you're into Kubernetes/GKE, the Google team is also very active and responsive.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/groups

[2] https://issuetracker.google.com/

Try hosting a web site that serves Iranian people or a variety of other embargoed countries on GCP. You can't, nor will you find any hint of it documented anywhere, or any legal indication things must be this way.

At the simplest level when I buy compute time that looks like everybody else's compute time, I don't want to find after the fact that its provisioning is entangled in some weird corporate ideology that is now impacting my end users, left waiting to be discovered by the unsuspecting victim long after they've made plans around GCP.

(This is a true story from 2 months back, same shit used to happen with App Engine all the time)

That's because Google, as an American company, needs to ensure it doesn't violate certain trade embargoes, trade export law and other sanctions imposed on specific countries, like Iran.

Here is a list of likely affected territories: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2891389?hl=en

  Google restricts access to some of its business services in certain countries or regions, such as Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. If you try to sign in to these services from these countries or regions, the following error appears:
  You appear to be signing in from a country where G Suite accounts are not supported.
  Certain Google services, such as Gmail, might be available in these countries or regions for personal use, but not for business or education use.

Though some of the Google services are available for personal use in those countries, commercial use is restricted. A cloud would count as commercial use, even if it's only to host your own stuff.

GCP is far from the only cloud to suffer from it and many other services impose this too. The Docker Hub does it too for example.

Didn't Iran come off the US embargo list a few months back, with a bunch of media fanfare at the time?

What on earth does that have to do with the quality of their support?

Massive intentionally undocumented gaps in service? That's the antithesis of support

Why would you think there's an intention to hide it?

Support == help desk. Not "features".

This is global politics, not a single corporation. Your complaints are against the completely wrong entity here.

Complain to the US government.

Their customer support for GCP is top notch and they re-organized their entire support structure this year so each account has an account executive, SREs, etc. I've been very pleased the last year I've used GCP after migrating from AWS.

Before the reoganization I'd send in quota updates and they'd take 1-3 days. The last quota bump I did took 7 minutes.

This might be true, but AWS's support is not good. To get good AWS support for when their ELBs aren't working, or when half of your EBS volumes have multi-second IO latency, you need to pay for premium support, which is 10% of your bill.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/

This is the same for GCP. Unless you pay for gold support it's essentially useless.

GCP will be replacing the percentage support cost model with a different system:

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/reimagining-sup...

This has been my biggest barrier to going anywhere near it. Support (well, the lack of it) for adwords has been utterly shite.

But anytime this comes up on HN there are a slew of comments saying that support is top notch for GCE, so it's worth an evaluation at least.

A few months ago I would've agreed with you. After trying out GCP, interacting with support twice and speaking with a few other companies using the platform I've changed my tune.

I've had overall pretty good experiences in my year on GCP, particularly recently. I posted a question in Slack and one of the engineers on the product PM'd me back within 15 mins to troubleshoot the problem.

If you have to raise a ticket it's a bit more variable, but on the whole I've had every issue resolved satisfactorily.

Looks like you are paying for support - are you on the Platinum or Gold support level?

Gold

This is simply not true. Support for GCP works as expected.

Still tainted from years of abusing adwords and adsense customers.

Google announced yesterday a partnership with Rackspace where they will be supporting GCP. https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/08/rackspace-now-offers-manag...

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