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Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has anyone actually tried their phone support for this service and can weigh in on it?

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We are having amusing problems with appengine. For example they provide no way to limit the number of instances they decide to start. If for example you run out of datastore i/o capacity (it doesn't scale with how much you pay) they will quite happily start more instances even though they won't help in any way, and actually make things worse.

We switched to premier which supposedly gets us all sorts of extra stuff, but for some bizarre reason will no longer show your daily charge breakdowns.

Roger, sorry to hear this. Can you ping me at bgold at google.com so I can make sure you are getting the right help? Thanks!

There's no way to limit the number of instances that are started, but there is a way to limit the number of idle instances that you are paying for.

It is the former that matters to us. Essentially our code receives an HTTP request with payload, does sanity checks and formatting, and then a datastore put. This is not CPU bound - it is idle wait for the datastore to finish.

When you run out of datastore capacity, appengine will start more instances because it sees the lengthening processing times, but that just makes things worse. That you cannot stop.

Our load comes from mobile clients and no humans are involved. If they get an error they try again later. They don't care how long the server side takes to respond.

It is insane that you can't limit the number of instances. appengine would create hundreds at some points, which was very lucrative for Google (our daily fees went from ~$15 to $380 at one point).

support is fantastic, we have a large cluster on GCE. I don't know how support will scale with general availability though.

You've called them on the phone? What were the incident(s) / support needs like on your part?

You know it seems very suspicious to create a new account to say this.

Especially since the common wisdom (and from my personal experience as well) is that Google's support is woeful.

I know that's the historical wisdom but we are working very and investing heavily to make sure that isn't true in general, and specifically for Cloud Platform. We've scaled our support team dramatically to support the influx of paid support with GA and are working hand-in-hand with lots of customers everyday. It's obviously never perfect, but I can assure you it's important to us and we are doing everything we can to make the experience with support as good as we can.

-Brian

Perhaps, and I'm not trying to be facetious, a detailed blog post regarding firstly, that this (customer service) has been an issue in the past, and secondly, the measures that have been taken ("We've scaled our support team dramatically") to ameliorate the support problem.

I see Google developing a bad reputation for customer service (on HN at least. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837249 for the most recent example) and some honest recognition of the problem could go a long way to restoring this.

I apologize if you aren't the correct person to direct this to; perhaps you can divert it to the correct channel.

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