Hacker News Reader

Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

In this post the author speaks a lot to how inaccessible Google is for any kind of support. This is one of the under appreciate reasons NOT to use services provided by the big cloud providers: AWS, GCP, etc.

I recently started a small SASS project for a client and decided that Heroku would be a good fit for the situation. That led me to use smaller independent service providers like Mailgun for email, Mapbox for maps, Transloadit for video encoding. I haven't needed much support but when I have I actually talk to real people (and developers on the other end). It's a very pleasant experience. I get much more of a feeling that they actually care about developers using their products. Plus it feels "good" to be supporting independent shops, instead of giant tech monoliths.

Consolidated billing can be annoying if you decide to go with many smaller, independent providers. At least Heroku covers that well.

View on HN

IDK about the other cloud providers, but if you have the support on your AWS account for businesses the support is excellent, skilled and fast. We have had support doing TCP dumps and other advanced troubleshooting whenever we've had a problem with their services. Google for their free* services is terrible yes. Which I don't use their services for anything important. I'd imagine they are better with GCP.

there's a lot of evils about AWS, but even their personal/developer support account has delivered good service for me -- they've really dug in and helped me on some tough questions, and not only limited to configuration.

At the office, we have AWS business level support, which has been really excellent for troubleshooting.

Agreed. Their business support has more visibility into your account than you do. They’ve been superb at finding issues fast and explaining things better than I can phrase the question.

You imagined wrong :)

Before using GCP I thought highly of them. Not I actually understand why they are number 3 or 4, well deserved.

I pay a ridiculously small $100/month for AWS support and they get the job done however I want it (chat, voice, email) at any hour of the day. I basically signed up for it so I'd have someone to blame if something went wrong, but they resolve every single issue to my satisfaction.

You pay a small monetary amount for now.

Most of these companies are super powers with blatant disregard for humanity. When it comes to the good in your life, the things around you; opportunities, options, community health... they are slowly but surely drinking your milkshake.

That's a little extreme.

I got hooked on Unix when as a dev/DBA I inherited Solaris administration that I wasn't really qualified for. Sun support bootstrapped my skills and taught me alot. In another gig I had similar experiences with IBM.

It contrasted heavily against Microsoft, where even the $$$ Premier offerings are pretty awful, with lots of ridiculous hoops between you and super-skilled SEs.

Companies may suck or not, but that doesn't mean their support organization sucks.

On the contrary, if you find a company with a policy of gaining maximum market share through time on a break-even cost structure, and if the market is very big, you can essentially ride “at cost” through the entire growth/capture era.

If you notice, since inception AWS consistently returns its economies of scale as pricing drops to customers, allowing AWS to capture more market share.

They’re drinking the milkshake of incumbent IT, and you can benefit like a remora riding a shark.

I honestly don't know what you're saying here. Please explain.

I don't think it's that small, it 10% of your bill for business support. ($100 if you are spending less that $1k).

And the support is ok sometimes. But when you actually discover an issue on their end they constantly try and flog you off, and then don't get back to you for ages.

I've yet to replicate that latter observation, having worked with AWS as an individual, part of a small company, and (currently) part of a recently-unicorn-statused startup. AWS support has always been pretty acutely responsive. This is obviously better if your company's big enough to shell out for enterprise support, but even the middle support tier (the one presumably being discussed here) ain't bad at all.

I used to use the free tier for the 1 year period, turned everything off, and have an alert set to go off at 1 penny of spend. Even with a lifetime spend of <$1 I still get to talk to real people for support at AWS.

It's crazy the extent to which for big companies this experience is different.

The large tech company that I work for has AWS developers& support lingering in dedicated Slack channels on our company Slack where they will help talk you through any issues and keep you updated on feature requests/bugs moving through the Amazon system.

yeah but Enterprise level support with TAM's cost upwards of 15k a month. That's pretty prohibitive for most small startups

You can pay $100/10% a month on Amazon and get good support. They will debug and guide you on. Hiring someone with the expertise you get would cost magnitudes of order more. And if your enterprise is at the level where it warrants 15k a month support, it is still worth it. Considering that still would barely get you only one skilled person hired.

This service is incredibly useful, my newly built EC2 instances rebooted randomly and I couldn't figure out why, so I opened up the chat, and they helped me debug, identify and mitigate the issue.

It turned out to be a bug between the newest Linux kernel available for Amazon Linux 2 and EC2, the mitigation was downgrading the kernel until an update was available.

I've worked in a lot of startups and have never had to pay that whole price until we had decent revenue. The AWS Activate program [1] has been pretty solid for my current company.

There's a big joke going around that AWS is basically a VC that invests in startups with free services and then makes their money back on revenue once they've grown.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/activate/

Actually, I had a great experience with Google Firebase support.

Suddenly, my apps were unable to connect to Firebase, after making sure that it's not me doing something wrong I contacted support and they came back to me in minutes, Together with the support engineer we debugged the issue, turned out that it was a configuration deployment error on their part and got if fixed.

What I am terrified of is having an issue with a free service that I depend on, like Gmail.

Google one is a support plan for consumer services. With some added benefits such as extra drive space. I had a good experience with them.

On this line, shoutout to Vultr for their support. Just today I opened a ticket with a relatively simple technical issue. I got a reply in 5 minutes ... yes 5 minutes, I couldn't believe it. My business with them so far is worth about 2 dollars, they will get many more from me, for sure!

I was using Retool and was looking for a feature.

Mentioned it in the chat window and within 60 seconds I got response, 10 minutes later the feature was pushed to production.

The velocity of startups can be really nice

I have always found AWS support to be pretty fantastic.

We have enterprise support at work with a named TAM who is amazing.

On my personal projects I have standard support and was able to speak to a very very capable tech on a sunday morning within 20 minutes.

Azure are pretty decent too, although they offload a lot of enterprise support to their partner network, but that works well enough.

GCP on the other hand...

Judging by the AWS support role interviews, I must say that they hire fantastic individuals who care about cases and the tech.

I think this is more a factor of percent of total earnings.

For example, my consumer and small business experience with Microsoft support is very negative. But working in an enterprise that always elects for the most expensive support package... I have never experienced better or more personal support than from Microsoft.

> That led me to use smaller independent service providers

I believe in doing this as well. These companies make or break themselves by delivering one product, and so you can trust they're going to do a very committed job of it. In comparison, services from Google seem like they're done by rotating groups of people who don't really care about what they're doing, and there's no longevity in the services unless they're super profitable.

I don't kno about AWS or GCP, but I've used Azure's technical support a few times over the years, and I've always been happy with the feedback, and the competence of the person providing it.

I'd assume GCP's support is poor, but I admit I'm basing that bias solely on my AdAwords support experience, which is and has always been, ludicrously bad.

I find that support for free products is impossible, but support for paid products is actually pretty good. For example, I was able to chat with a google checkout person to cancel an order pretty quickly, and when I had a domain issue, I was able to chat with a google domain person very easily as well.

I guess you get what you pay for.

I paid for the $150/month support option for gcloud and found it very good - they had engineers go over the code I wrote to help debug an issue on three different occasions, for example.

Isn't Heroku using AWS under the hood? So you are still supporting AWS?

You've stumbled across the Fox and Rabbit Product paradigm: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/fox-and-rabbit-pro...

AWS support is in general nice and helpful. GCP, abysmal indeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com