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Comment by notfried | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy the article's argument around the "Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google". Yes, it is highly unlikely that Google will wake-up one day and announce a deprecation day for GCP, like they did with dozens of other products. What is not unlikely though is that they under-invest in it compared to AWS, and being a 2nd or 3rd player, they would fall behind in products and/or reliability, unable to compete on price or features due to better economies of scale of the competitors.

Before Google kills products, they lose interest in them.

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It can create problems from a different angle, though. Google might lock your account for no reason for a week, without any explanation. If that happens, it's your problem if you lose your whole business after a week of downtime. Since it's Google, you can't even contact support.

This has happened to me a couple of times. Once, my account was locked for a day because their system flagged one of my servers for suspicious traffic. They locked all my servers, databases, and everything else, not just that one server. Another time, they locked a different project for a week. It actually took me a week to find a human who could unlock it; otherwise, it could have been even longer. I still don't know the reason for the lock.

So the main problem is that Google don't care about GCP at all, and threat paid customers in same way as free users (i.e., hostile to both)

GCP doesn't really have the Google problem of lacking support contacts. I've managed relationships with GCP for a couple of different companies now (from startup to mid-size enterprise), and in all cases I had multiple dedicated account reps that I could not only get on a phone, but frequently met with in person.

Maybe the story is different for very very small fish, but I had decent experiences with support even at the ~20-person company spending ~5k/month level.

Maybe it also depends on a country? In my country the AWS support is incomparable.

After the last incident (with a week of downtime) I learned that they have a paid support, which you have to sign up in advance so it didn't work for us at that moment.

Now we signed up for it, though I still not sure how it works and how I supposed to contact them in case of an emergency. All I see they charge us something for that support agreement, hope I will never need it.

My company spends maybe $4k/mo with GCP, and I have absolutely no idea who my "dedicated account rep" is. I did have someone contact me way back when, but after finding out we aren't VC funded they literally ghosted me.

I don't really enjoy being on GCP for that reason, but I need it for BigQuery, so...

That's exactly why would I newer support opting for GCP.

With AWS, we have our account manager, whom I can call and he actually has some powers and can fix and do stuff for us.

Surprise surprise, paid GCP customers get the same.

Not in my experience, unfortunately. The reps we got with GCP could give us advice, but no real powers to push stuff or solve problems, it felt more like L1 support. As described bellow, maybe it depends on a company size and/or a country.

our account manager definitely opened doors for us and got us in touch with experts that could solve our issues.

150 sized company in a small EU country. We have a silver enterprise contract.

> paid GCP customers get the same

I think paid may be relative with GCP.

Not going to happen; they kill consumer- not enterprise products. I searched https://killedbygoogle.com/ for "Google Cloud" and the only dead enterprise products that stood out were Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cloud Prediction API. But they replaced those with Firebase Cloud Messaging and the AI Platform Prediction API.

And Enterprise Hangouts:

> Workspace customers (the paid business version of Google apps) finally had Hangouts removed in March 2022

And Google Domains..

And Google Cloud IoT Core..

And Google Go Links..

And Google Maps Coordinate..

...

It's not highly unlikely. Google has so much ad money at hand, anything else hardly matters.

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