Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Google has two big problems - developer relations and compliances.

Here's a very simple example - has anyone filed a ticket in Google cloud ? Well you cant, unless you are on an expensive tier of support. Even when you have one, it is super hard to file a ticket. They generally ask you to go to Google groups.

AWS and Azure ticket support is beyond awesome. Anything from issues with servers to billing. AWS has live chat support for 29$ per month. In India, the only way to get postpaid billing is through a local Google partner : Google will not do it. On AWS and Azure, it's a simple process after you hit a certain spend .

AWS Artifact is a brilliant self service tool for compliance. And I can't stress this enough - they do this country by country. They will issue digitally signed (for you) compliance documents for free. In fact, in India they went above and beyond and did specific compliance (using a big-4 consultancy) because of some regulatory changes that I highlighted.

I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service. Their entire sales org is broken.

As pointed out later in this thread you can now buy a support plan that allows you to file tickets directly from Google [1].

Unfortunately it starts at $100 per user per month and that tier won't get you a number to call, just a ticketing system, and in my experience response times are in a minimum of hours. For actual production systems you're going to want the $250 per user per month option that gives you a number to call.

> I really like the product that Google has - but they are running a cloud service like a b2c service. When it should be run like a b2b service.

I couldn't agree more with you about this. A lot of people love to knock Azure and AWS but their support, in my experience, is in a completely different league to GCP.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-options

AWS also won't hesitate to help on bare "free tier" accounts if the issue is billing related, which is awesome. I accidentally ran up $400 by setting up the managed private Certificate Authority and forgetting about it, and AWS billing was quick to give me a $400 credit since the private CA went virtually unused.

Agreed. Slack is also awesome in this respect. You file a ticket and a human answers it quickly and it doesn’t matter if you are the IT department asking the question or just a regular user in the enterprise. They even offer live chat. I have no idea how to file a bug / feature suggestion with google. Big missed opportunity.

We need a version of Godwin's law for slack.

New VC market opportunity question: will they name a Godwin’s like law after you.

You can go to https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers and open a ticket at the respective product public issue tracker without a paid support plan.

These are issue trackers. I'm not reporting a bug in Google. I want support on "how to do X" or "I purchased this reserved instance by accident, can I get a refund".

Fair enough. For questions, Stack Overflow is what they usually point to. Sometimes GCP staff logs on and answers, otherwise the community.

For the refund scenario, I found this: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues

You can also vent in their feedback widget within Console. To my surprise the product managers actually read it, and sometimes respond back for more information.

There's also a UserVoice forum to voice out feature requests for each product: https://googlecloudplatform.uservoice.com/forums/299943-goog...

I also recently found out there is slack channel ! But look, this is not what people want. We are looking for a plain, vanilla, ticketing system that someone can respond to. GCloud does have it at the Gold level support.

So in my mind, GCloud is more figure-it-yourself-dont-call-us . AWS is more dependable. They have scaled their sales/devrel/support ops so that a small startup can access it.

Google only does this for the Snapchats of the world.

Well, you have a point. I would wish for that too :) For now, I like to think that GCP products work well enough as advertised without much support interference, and so far I haven't been let down too badly.

Perhaps a contentious point that I feel is true is that AWS tech is less-dependable, hence they need more support to compensate.

> AWS tech is less-dependable

How so?

I work at a business with a business support plan - 10% of your monthly spend.

I have had a 100% success rate. For example I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to configure a cross account CodePipeline work flow, the support guy did what he could while we were on chat, but eventually, he just asked me to export my pipeline definition, spent the next day researching, called me back and walked me through it with a screen share.

You basically can’t do it via the console.

> We are looking for a plain, vanilla, ticketing system that someone can respond to.

You definitely don't have to be Snapchat-sized to get access to the support console where you open tickets. The base plan is $100/m, which is admittedly more expensive than Amazon's $29/m but should give exactly what you're looking for.

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/support/#support-options

ahh - it has actually gone down. About 6 months back, it was 150-200$ per month and before that it was always a percentage of spend. I just saw that the old gold/silver/platinum have gone away and replaced with role-based support options.

Thanks for highlighting that!

Isn't it $100/month/user? How are users calculated?

Yeah gcp model is not user friendly at all. I hope they’re working on improving it there’s no way to win if they keep on how they’re going . I personally like support via slack. Scaleft had it and it was amazing. I only joined the gcp slack yesterday so I don’t know if there are answers as well as questions.

If I work for a Fortune 500 company I’m not going to be okay with sometimes getting a response on a good day.

Nothing there matters unless you work at Google. They are a general dumping ground of feature requests and bug reports with many being several years old.

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