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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure? Is GSuite or GCP support any worse or are you just assuming those experiences are the same as what you get with a free GMail account?

I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free.

In other words, I think you’re repeating really common criticisms of Google in general, but I can’t tell if you’re speaking objectively or from a matter of pure opinion.

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I'm an enterprise GCP customer, Google Support have a few superbly irritating habits: 1. They link to generic documentation that doesn't solve my problem 2. They insist that things that are clearly bugs aren't bugs until they're provided with some trivial reproduction case that satisfies them 3. They refuse to advise on issues with beta products despite half of GCP's products being in a beta 4. They are sometimes just flat-out wrong (but confidently so) about the cause of an issue

Give me AWS support any day

I'm an Enterprise AWS customer(well, I work for one), our account is special enough that we've got extra AWS tech people on site regularly in addition to normal support, and I've seen 1, 2, and 4 with AWS, both regular support and our on-top handholding.

On top of that AWS documentation is often both needlessly opaque, elliptical, incomplete, and outdated or otherwise incorrect.

On the other hand, if the issue isn't too obscure, AWS’s huge marketshare means that you can usually find decent answers on SO.

AWS has become hard to grasp in full scale.

I am currently in a support role at a company(not GCP) with some pretty big enterprise customers and let me just say that supporting software is fucking hard.

You essentially have to be a systems engineer/sysadmin for every one of your customers with only as much context as your customer is willing to share.

I like my job, but please have mercy on support.

You are 100% right, but it's worth noting that this is why there's a whole model of b2b interaction that involves embedded engineers partnering with a company to solve their specific problems (IBM, SAP, etc.).

The reason Google support has a hard time of it is Google doesn't offer that model to all its customers, just the ones that can pay a lot of money. But support still has the job of helping everyone else (with all the challenges you've described that such entails).

I think most of the annoyance with Google is their culturally not seeming to understand that model even exists.

Their zeitgeist appears to be "Other companies needed to provide that because their technology was wrong / incomplete. We'll just build things right instead."

Which is batshit insane, in the same way that expecting a veterinary pharmacist could prescribe for humans... with better technology.

To be fair I too probably wouldn't accept something as a bug until provided by a trivial reproduction case. I have seen too many developers call things bugs before looking at their own code.

It was a documentation/error response bug in their API, so it was hard to reproduce trivially. I gave them some source that reproduced it (https://github.com/samcgardner/neg-lb-initialiser), which really seems like it ought to be sufficient - it reliably reproduces wrong behaviour.

I do have experience as a GCP customer. I may not be a big customer of GCP, but I do spend around 3k/year in G Suite and 38k/year. It is uttermost impossible to have a phone conversation with somebody from GCP. You just can’t get a hold of somebody there.

Contrast that with AWS, where I had 4 engineers (back when our bill was 12k/year) helping us with recommending certain arquitectures and actively being useful anytime we reach out.

Our AWS expenses tripled because of growth and us choosing them for new components while our GCP expenses have remained flat.

Amounts like 30k/year may not sound big to many folks, but when you go to a truly good SaaS organization and spend that kind of cash, you get excellent support (online or offline). Google has absolutely amazing services that for the most part do not require human support, but for the times that you actually do, it is simply non-existant.

We're a new GCP customer with a growing amount of spend as we investigate multi-cloud (coming from AWS multi-account, words can't effectively express how much of a joy GCP is to work with).

It may be because we're an attractive customer with a very large amount of AWS spend, but the folks at GCP have made our adoption pretty amazing. We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services, in addition to onsite training/consultation with experts (all paid for by Google).

I've had to use support a couple of times and found it pretty on par with support I've gotten out of AWS.

Like any provider of services, I've found that relationships are key. Cultivating a good relationships with your reps/contacts goes a long way in their willingness to go the extra mile for you.

But, interactions with our reps have grown fewer (we're told their customer success/technical account management teams are understaffed), and it may be a sign that we're getting out of the honeymoon phase. We'll see.

> We've had multiple on-boarding and troubleshooting calls with the actual product managers of GCP services

As have we. But that should ring a few alarm bells in regards to scalability and whether that can continue.

Google should just cut IBM's support org (the older, experienced folks) off the carcass, retrain them, and use them as a cadre for building their own org.

> I mean, what kind of support does a small business with two EC2 Instances or three Office 365 licenses really get? I can’t imagine you get to call someone and get in-depth technical help for free.

AWS frequently will communicate detailed, specific technical workarounds and instructions via email on the free support plan. I’ve reached out to GCP support and the best I’ve ever received was a link to a generic support document.

AWS does give 1-1 support to smaller clients, and you can also pay extra to get actual phone help. The OP may or may not have had direct experience with this but his criticisms ring true with mine.

You failed to read his point. He is talking about their reputation, not whatever-happens-in-practice.

My point was that their reliance on reputation was misguided, especially in the case of a large conglomerate with many business units targeting consumers and businesses separately.

> Do you have any experience with GCP as an enterprise customer compared to AWS or Azure?

The point is that that doesn't matter. Even if it's not always logical, the reputation of your company as a whole sometimes matters, even in the case of corporate accounts ("nobody got fired for buying IBM" after all). Moreso in the case of startups where you have one tech guy who might have gotten burned before.

Amazon has a stellar reputation since nearly everyone has gotten a refund from Amazon for some cheap DOA $2 cable but meanwhile Google stonewalled them on some random glitch in Gmail. Even if it's not logical, those things stick around in people's heads.

$50 gets you a support contract, and you can cancel it when you’re done.

That small business can also look at https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ and know that a 15 year old boring and low utilization service still bums along.

Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service. Most of the GCP services that were there before and gone today have just been renamed or consolidated.

One could argue also that AWS has too many often esoteric services, and if they focused on making some of them more feature-full the service would improve (disclosure we use both and I think both are perfectly good cloud services).

> Google's reputation for killing services is wholly earned, but there's a difference between a service and an offering within the service.

No, I don't think there really is.

With AWS, I've got full confidence that if I engineer something on a service like SimpleDB, it will keep chugging along on the AWS side long after my side stops working. I don't have that same confidence in Google.

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