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Comment by sorry_outta_gas | Hacker News Reader

Google is poor at support, web hosting/cloud is as much about support as it is technology

In my little experience, although GCP docs leaves a lot to be desired, the support was always very thorough and fast to answer, even for not critical/emergency situations.

They have improved a lot recently

One of the frustrating thing with their docs is that they keep changing them without versioning (last time I checked). So it’s easy to feel like you’re being gaslighted because assumptions you made on the basis of the docs could have changed and then you look stupid.

AWS being the dominant player means that if they make any silent changes there will be a SO/GitHub issue/HN thread about it. But with GCP without their pricy professional tier support you can feel a bit unsure and lost all the time about your understanding of it.

To be honest, AWS cloud support isn't that fantastic either. Responses to tickets usually come in 48 hours, if not more.

I don't know about you, but in 48 hours I've usually already built a workaround and moved on to other projects.

Not saying that AWS support is worse or even equal to GCP support, but just commenting that cloud support in general feels pretty useless and an afterthought at best.

And let's not even get started on the horrible, awful UI in AWS console.

pay for enterprise support, response is within minutes

You have to pay for support. I've found it to be one of the best. I've open a ticket in the portal with a detailed issue before I go to lunch and have a level 3 tech call me before I get back.

I've had this happen multiple times for multiple services and the person's i was able to work with had enough knowledge and access to either see detailed logs and walk me through some undocumented feature or file a bug report by days end.

I'm spoiled in that regard but I've never had non-enterpise support with anything other than the 4 hour sla.

It can really depend. I know a lot of stories of AWS support being stellar while google was bad (even discounting support for non-GCP stuff from the list).

But at the same time I can refer to enterprise-tier support at AWS, which has gone past ticket stage into "regular calls with AWS support engineers to help architect our solution" and certain critical topics ended up ghosted (my first reaction was that support had no idea about the functionality we asked about, later experienced taught me that at best, the AWS documentation lied by omission. At worst it was divorced from reality.)

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