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Comment by dvnguyen | Hacker News Reader

One thing is really strange in this thread is that almost every opinion against Google's customer support are down voted heavily. Google advocates always say that GCP support is better. Of course they have to be better because they are the underdog in the cloud war. I can't buy the logic that GCP is Google but not that Google. What would happen if they could dominate?

Don't get me wrong. GCP as a product is really awesome. I've been using GCE and Datastore for a project and they just work. I just can't trust Google enough to bring all my works to their cloud.

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Probably because it's something that comes up in every discussion about GCP, just like Go and generics.

And some of these comments are pretty useless. Like this [1] one. What's even the point? If you can't offer anything interesting, not even an anecdotal data point about reliability, why even contribute?

There's every sign that Google is serious about their IaaS. For example, Google is already dogfooding GCP heavily. According to googlers, a bunch of public Google products run on GCP.

Also, it's worth mentioning that GCP support is very good these days.

Sure, Google is no longer non-evil, and they are deservedly notorious for killing products, but GCP is a different category altogether. They deserve being given the benefit of the doubt in this case, especially as IaaS world really benefits from competition.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13831966

What Google products run on GCP? That's news to me. I would think they would have announced that in the keynote.

No idea. The information comes from Tim Hockin, Engineering Manager at Google: https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/5vuyls/apache_m...

A lot of internal apps (including Memegen) run on GCP. It's simpler to start coding and get something up and running on than bare Borg.

Google Registry does. Site here: https://registry.google And you can even see our code: https://nomulus.foo

(I work on this project.)

That's great, but nobody is going to care all that much if Google Registry or Memegen is down for a few hours. The concern is that Google is asking customers to put mission critical applications on a system that Google itself doesn't put mission critical applications on.

We have a 24/7/365 5-minute-to-ACK pager rotation. ICANN and our customers certainly care if random parts of the Internet start dropping off. Our annual total downtime is measured in minutes.

I can tell you from personal experience that GCP is suitable for these purposes.

Which random parts of the Internet start dropping off if Google Registry is down? I'm under the impression that there wouldn't be any news articles (or even tweets) if Google Registry is down for a few hours and that hardly anybody would notice at all. Please explain what I'm missing.

If the registry goes down, WHOIS, domain checks, and DNS/nameserver updates all start failing instantly. Anyone looking to buy a domain, or update an existing one, will get error messages. If someone happens to be caught in the middle of, say, migrating hosting providers as this happens (which is statistically likely when there are a large number of domain names under management), then they'll be unable to update DNS to point to where the domain name should now go. As the outage grows in length, you'll gradually accumulate more and more stale nameserver entries that cannot be updated, resulting in an increasing number of domain names failing to resolve properly, and thus dropping off the Internet. Additionally, ICANN has stability and uptime requirements, to the point where your gTLDs can be taken away from you if you're doing a poor job of running your registry.

Now, granted, we aren't currently running any hugely important TLDs at the moment, but that won't necessarily continue to be the case going forward, plus we aren't the only ones to be using our codebase ... http://www.donuts.domains/donuts-media/press-releases/donuts...

> Now, granted, we aren't currently running any hugely important TLDs at the moment,

That's exactly the point. Google doesn't put anything mission critical on GCP, which is a huge red flag for anybody putting mission critical applications in a cloud.

That's only because we don't have any yet, not because we're afraid of GCP. When they launch they will be on our platform, same as all our other TLDs.

> GCP as a product is really awesome. I've been using GCE and Datastore for a project and they just work. I just can't trust Google enough to bring all my works to their cloud.

I work in GCP and can say that we definitely realize this is an issue and are doing our best to address it. We definitely know that trust has been lost and it takes time to regain it, but hopefully you'll give us a chance again sometime.

I am fairly new but it certainly feels as though GCP is a bit different than the other parts of Google. I suspect this is especially true since Diane Greene came. It definitely feels like everyone knows we need to adopt a different culture to be able to sell to enterprise customers.

I'm in the same boat - I felt burned by GAE from way back in the day and so passed GCP over for AWS. After then making a POC zone day I was blown away by how far Google had come and so moved all of my next project over to GCE/GKE.

Our experience has been great with GCP's support and I've interacted with several of their PM's by just using twitter and HN.

Support for their free consumer products is completely different from a paid enterprise offering like GCP. This is true at pretty much every major company that serves both groups.

Maybe because there's a lot of people here who have positive experiences? If GCP has good support, then comments claiming otherwise based on nothing but generalisations of Google's support for other products should be down voted – untrue claims don't add to the conversation, they detract from it.

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