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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

Completely anecdotally speaking - at a few enterprises, convincing customers to make use of GCP has been an uphill battle. I notice deep misgivings regarding the support timescales, and even for supported products, poor support in general (ymmv+++).

GCP do have a clause in their SLA/T&C where they promise a 1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate, but that hasn't helped assuage fears - they want longer timescales and better support.

> That's just not enough when you need something easy to setup that you can build then forget about for a decade. That's just the reality of how software projects are done for non-technical businesses

Thank you for phrasing this, a few years ago I would not have believed it, and after some experience this resonates quite well.

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Thanks, I used to do consulting so I've seen this firsthand. Many of our non-technical clients demanded Azure even when it wasn't ideal (this was years ago, before they cloned most of AWS).

Why? Microsoft is known for long term support, at reasonable prices. Any business that's survived more than a decade loves them for it.

We had clients running Windows 95 in VM's if that gives you an idea of how far some companies will go with "if it ain't broke don't fix it". It wasn't an usual request for IT help keeping cousin Bob's old VBA macros going another decade. Maybe 20% of our revenue was for crazy shit like that. And for good reason, many times we gave them a quote to rebuild the system (we did about 50/50 IT/Software) and it was indeed more expensive than hacking something up to keep it limping along.

1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.

> Windows 95 in a VM

Puh-lease! I log into a VMS server every day to access an application that saw it's last update in 1995. Which wasn't even deployed until 2001. It will be replaced this year with a Win95 era application, complete with acres of giant grey buttons, served over a Citrix link from VMs running Server 2008. Bleeding edge, boys, bleeding edge.

Statistically a new software project - especially if done by a team with no common history of past successes - is risky.

So, if business values stability over risk, I understand very well if they select very very very very long term support option rather than to create the product from scratch.

Fellow consultant here that has seen a lot of similar issues. I am currently tasked with rewriting a Delphi application that supports business in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. It was written by a guy in his garage in Alabama. He sold the source code to the former parent company of my client. We now have a vm of the image of the guys laptop and the heavily customized Delphi environment required to build this application should a change be required. Apparently he built a bunch of delphi ide plugins to configure the environment, and should you try to build it with the latest Delphi IDE, you are SOL.

Yes yes, there is a WinXP PC in our department with screen covered with a white paper with large font size text "This PC is under remote operation by Structure department, Do Not Shut it down."

Obviously there is a highly domain specific application for our Civil & Structural works last updated 10+ years ago. No one familiar/willing to upgrade it's internal licensing systems to work on newer Windows. So here we go. Whoever needs to work on it, take Remote Desktop. Simple.

For some of this stuff (Autocad, I'm looking at you...) it used to be the case that you could shell out a one-time $$$$ and get a license for v5.0 that would work for all eternity. The companies even gave you minor upgrades to support new OSes.

But since these guys have now switched to a subscription licensing model, they no longer do that, so there are scattered XP boxen around running ancient versions of various expensive software that just keeps working.

> 1 year support is a joke. That's not even enough time for a company that builds software to migrate.

It's not enough to finish writing the requirements. One of our customers won't touch anything unless 15 years of support is guaranteed. And that's what they get.

"Reasonable prices" is only fair compared to, for example, Oracle's gouging. It's not that MS has actually reasonable support pricing, just that ELA maintenance has become a cornerstone of most CIO's IT budget so there's no real incentive to do anything differently. I think the more important factor here is that MS sysadmins are a dime a dozen and the ramp from supporting an on-prem data center to "Azure Cloud" is a lot lower than learning something brand new.

'1 year notice in the case of any services they plan to deprecate' - that is barely enough for a SMB and it is not possible or acceptable for any enterprise customer! Imagine how long it takes to investigate on new solutions, rewriting stuff, testing it, releasing, etc... 1 year is a joke which I might accept as a startup with a single node.js app but would not as a CTO of any company.

As far as I know, AWS has never abandoned a service. They deprecate services and occasionally make services unavailable for new accounts.

SimpleDB is probably a good example. You can find 5 year old threads discussing whether Amazon is going to kill it. But it appears to still be there.

The business value they’ve gained by earning the trust to not kill services is far higher than their cost to keep some old things in maintenance mode, I assume

SimpleDB is still used by Amazon's own services, it's not going anywhere.

Technically Amazon and not AWS but they deprecated then removed two separate payment APIs one after the other (SimplePay and another).

It’s the reason we haven’t adopted the latest replacement. Why bother?

Edit: thanks, it was indeed FPS.

> another

I was in a team that worked on "another" :-). Some of the best memories of my professional life were formed during that period! At launch that was indeed as part of AWS. However it then came under Amazon Payments entity due to legal reasons. Felt sad to see it retired though[1]

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=3045

I think payment APIs have all kinds of social and legal problems associated with them that go beyond the technical.

Support is the main reason I wouldn't use GCP. Production is down and the only response I get is an automated email? No thanks.

Honestly that was my experience with Amazon.

GCP comparably has been pretty good to me I n terms of support. But that’s probably because I actually have a support contract with them. (And, I didn’t with Amazon)

I think most people who complain are not /actually/ buying support.

The expectation being that support is baked into the service price. But this isn’t the case with any of the cloud providers as far as I understand.

I paid for GCP support. It was laughable. I’d send a question like: I’m using feature A to do XYZ. The documentation <here> does not include corner case XYZ. Please advise.

They would reply. Please see documentation (same link I just sent). After the second or third try I just stopped bothering.

Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and now even Canonical offer at least 10 years of support for their core products. That should be the bar for anyone who wants to enter the "enterprise" market. What's the point of using a software stack that comes with 10 years of support if the platform you're running it on won't be there in 10 years?

> 1 year notice

makes me laugh that they think 1 year notice is enough. should be at least 5 for my business to properly consider it.

Yeah one year is a step in right direction, but in the enterprises that I’ve worked at, getting capex for maintenance activity like that is usually an 18-24 month process.

If everything on a platform is an emergency, that vendor won’t be around in those businesses.

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