Is Google Cloud support this good in general, or only for certain tiers or plans?
We have the expensive off-the-shelve support option (I think 450/seat/month) for 1h response.
In most cases, we spend more time back and forth with support than it would take you to figure it out. I'm talking about issues that span over weeks with tens of hours spent. We end up reiterating the original support case problem (i.e. the support engineer doesn't bother reading the actual problem) whenever the engineer changes.
We've had: P1s where the support engineer told us we'll get an update the following day, only to figure out that there was a breaking release on their side that exactly matched our description. While investigating a load balancer issue, the support engineer looked at the LB logs, saw a ton of logs coming from penetration scans (e.g. GET /phpmyadmin), and suggested that the solution was to open up those addresses.
On the flip side, it's encouraging that they have people somewhere in the support chain who are capable enough to read Linux kernel code and submit fixes upstream.
The case was indeed fun to work with, but the main reason why it had such a fast and happy resolution was because the customer was very responsive and very cooperative.
I cannot talk for every Technical Solution Engineer, but I can tell you that I have no particular interest in simply closing a ticket: I want to go down the rabbit hole and solve technical issues, and I know many of my colleagues feel the same.
I am also far from being the most senior or skilled TSE in Google Cloud Support, I just wrote an article about one of most interesting cases I had.
Also, I wonder how you learn all these knowledge (that is, asking for recommendation on a few books/resources for learning) if you don't mind sharing. Thanks in advance!
During the interview process at Google we don't expect candidates to be able to get to this level of depth, but we try to hire candidates that could, over time and depending on their skill set, potentially reach a similar level of depth and ability to troubleshoot cases.
I'm one of the TSEs who handle networking cases. True to what was said, I was hired with very little networking background, but plenty of development and hardware information.
I've since taken the mantle for handling most of the cases dealing with Interconnects and VPNs. I enjoy it too!
Oh, yeah, we're hiring: https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?company=Google&q=Te...
In my experience, Google Cloud is better than most organizations about escalating hard issues up to the chain. Admittedly, this happened at a company with substantial spend, and I can't say one way or another whether a smaller player would get the same quality of support.
It will also get you a dedicated sales rep and sales team, and they will absolutely crack the whip on internal teams to get issues resolved. At those spends, you can almost get an in-house support team of PSOs to bounce problems off of.
> and they will absolutely crack the whip on internal teams to get issues resolved
Not in my experience. Although we did get an ever-rotating rep. I think they changed three of them in like a year or so