Why you should not use Google Cloud

https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-google-cloud-75ea2aec00de

by samdung • 8 years ago

895 357 8 years ago

medium.com

some_account• 8 years ago

I don't get it. Why use Google at all? There are tons of better things out there.

gruez• 8 years ago

its pricing is pretty good, at least for VMs.

dewey2• 8 years ago

I’d say that really depends on what you need. If you want a full platform with a lot of integrated services there’s really only GCP, AWS, Azure, Tencent, AliBaba and maybe something else I forgot. So I wouldn’t say it’s a ton of better things that are available. Sure if you only need a bunch of VMs you have a lot of options.

laegooose• 8 years ago

I had AliCloud experience similar to OP but they gave me 24 hour deadline.

"We have temporarily closed your Alibaba Cloud account due to suspicious activity. Please provide the following information within [24 hours] by email to compliance_support@aliyun.com in order to reopen your account: ... If you fail to provide this information your account will be permanently closed, and we may take other appropriate and lawful measurers. Best regards, Alibaba Cloud Customer Service Center "

I provided the documents in ~30 hours because that's when I saw the email. There was no further communication from Alibaba. I assumed everything is ok, but in 2 weeks my account was terminated.

whitexn--g28h• 8 years ago

Triton cloud! Joyent has a wonderful service that allows setting up multi-cloud environments.

halbritt15• 8 years ago

GCP's managed Kubernetes product is superior to EKS and AKS.

I personally prefer using their API and tools over AWS. They seem more sensible. Azure is horrible.

GCP offers inter-region networking and more sensible firewalls and routers.

Pricing is pretty comparable to AWS, slightly better for instances, slightly worse for storage.

Storage performance for persistent SSD seems a little better than EBS GP2.

Cheap local disks on any kind of instance.

thickice• 8 years ago

Do you know if gcp firewall has limits on the number of rules and what those limits are ?

manigandham8• 8 years ago

For managed services, there are better options.

For just VMs with the fastest CPU, storage, networking and the easiest billing compared to other major clouds, GCP wins.

sargun5• 8 years ago

I wonder if OP paid for Support? https://cloud.google.com/support/?options=premium-support#op...

And had they converted their project to monthly invoicing: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/invoiced-billin...

lisper4• 8 years ago

What difference does that make? There's no justification for intentionally shutting down a potentially critical service with no warning.

sargun5• 8 years ago

IIRC, A couple things:

* When you have invoicing setup, the above shouldn't happen. You need to keep a payment method in good standing, but you have something like 10 days to pay your bill. -- They do a little bit more vetting (KYC) on the invoice path, and that effectively gets you out of dodge.

* Without paying for premium support, there's effectively no support.

I think if someone didn't pay their bill on time, you might shut off their service too, wouldn't you?

olefoo2• 8 years ago

"Oh hey, it looks like $customer suddenly started a bunch of coinminers on their account at 10x their usual usage rate. Perfectly fine. Let them rack up a months billing in a weekend; why not?"

A hypothetical but not unheard of scenario in which immediate shutdown might be warranted.

It's a rough world and different providers have optimised for different threat models. AWS wants to keep customers hooked; GCP wants to prevent abuse, Digital Ocean wants to show it's as capable as anyone else.

If you can afford it, you build resilient multicloud infrastructure. If you can't yet do that; at the very least ensure that you have off-site backups of critical data. Cloud providers are not magic; they can fail in bizarre ways that are difficult to remedy. If you value your company you will ensure that your eggs are replicated to more than one basket and you will test your failover operations regularly. Having every deploy include failing over from one provider to another may or may not fit your comfort level; but it can be done.

ikiris3• 8 years ago

Yes, there is or they wouldn't turn it off. Companies aren't in the habit of trying not to take your money for services without a pretty damn good reason.

And if it was that critical it should have support and a SLA contract, and you know, backups.

awinder2• 8 years ago

Whether AWS or Google Cloud, if you’re running a real business with real downtime costs, you need to pay for enterprise support. You’ll get much faster response times so that you can actually meet your SLA targets, and you’ll get a wealth of information and resources from live human beings that can help even into the design phases.

Feel free to budget that into your choices on where to host, but getting into any arrangement where you rely on whatever free tier of support is nonsensical once you’re making any kind of money.

sneak2• 8 years ago

Paying for Enterprise Support simply so that they don’t fuck you over sounds a lot like hidden costs to me. The service should be enterprise-grade even if you don’t.

awinder2• 8 years ago

If you run an enterprise, pay for enterprise support. If you aren’t (r&d accounts, startups that aren’t monetized yet, etc.) then don’t pay for it. Flexibility is the model here, and it’s utilized by the big players, so being naive to the business model will burn you on many public clouds.

johlindenbaum• 8 years ago

Totally agree. There’s so many missing redundancies on this project. CTO / Dir. Eng should have their own card. They should have some contact with a Google account rep, and at least the basic support package.

We’re not a big Google customer, couple thousand a month, but when we migrated we instantly reached out to account reps and have regular quarterly check ins.

halbritt15• 8 years ago

True.

Even still, I feel like it's still reasonably likely that the robot would shut down a project for "suspicious activity".

halbritt15• 8 years ago

This has nothing to do with enterprise support, which is terrible and everything to do with the fact that Google has automated as much decision making as possible and is terrible at interacting with customers.

I'm not sure if it's the culture of secrecy or sheer cluelessness, but it's pretty bad.

I'm not trying to slam them either, I still really like their products and use them.

ubernostrum• 8 years ago

Regular Google support: two days after your stuff goes down, you get an email saying the algorithms decided you're fraudulent.

Enterprise Google support: one day after your stuff goes down, you get a phone call saying the algorithms decided you're fraudulent.

javajosh• 8 years ago

Well that's a real Horror Story and I hope Google's listening. I guess Amazon web services really is the way to go.

jacquesm11• 8 years ago

Does it really matter whether you get bitten by the dog or the cat?

MemphisTN1• 8 years ago

False equivalence. Amazon built their products on putting customers first while Google is like a giant robot overlord without a human interface

dangero• 8 years ago

Wow as a CTO this is a nightmare scenario. Is this common? I guess this means google.com does not use Google Cloud because I’m sure they have uptime targets. They cannot handle incidents like this and expect people to take them seriously as a cloud provider.

kkirsche• 8 years ago

Read the SRE book and learn about the companies you are talking about…

fwdpropaganda• 8 years ago

I'm not the person you were responding to, but I'd be curious to hear more. Could you please explicitely say whatever it was that you were implying?

shaneos• 8 years ago

I wonder how prevalent this behavior is. Mozilla behaves the same towards browser extensions, which put business depends on. They removed our extension multiple times, each time before asking for something different, be it uncompressed source code, instructions for how to build it, a second privacy policy separate from our sites policy and more. Each time we would have happily responded to a request promptly, but instead you find out when you’ve been shut down already.

Grace periods that respect your business should be a standard that all service providers hold themselves to

ryan-c4• 8 years ago

It sounds to me like Mozilla identified your extension as potentially malicious and prioritizing user safety, shut you down first.

As far as I know, Mozilla has no business relationship with extension developers, so I would actually be very concerned if their first action wasn't to cut you off.

jazoom12• 8 years ago

I can confirm Mozilla handles this very poorly. I had the exact same experience with them. It was so bad that I actually just left the extension off their store and now focus on Chrome.

There is nothing dodgy about the extension. Mozilla was just being ridiculous.

caiocaiocaio• 8 years ago

I think I have been linked to at least a few hundred Medium articles, and this is maybe the third one that was good.

lioeters• 8 years ago

Sensible complaint/explanation for how this customer was treated: mission-critical systems getting shut down without prior notice.

iosDrone• 8 years ago

Wow, that is insane. Hope this gets distributed widely to Google Cloud decision-makers.

aleph-• 8 years ago

So piggybacking on this, I have a similar story to tell. We had a nice young startup, infra entirely built out on Google Cloud. Nicely, resiliently built, good solid stuff. Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately, wasn't able to bring it up for several hours, thank god we hadn't gone live yet as we were then told by support that because of the grey area of our tech, they couldn't guarantee this wouldn't keep happening. And in fact told us straight out that it would and we should move.

So maybe think about which hosting provider to go with, don't get me wrong I like their tech. But their moderation does need a more human element, to be frank all their products do. Simply ceding control to algorithmic judgement just won't work in the short term if ever at all.

dewey2• 8 years ago

Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot

Can you elaborate on that? What do they monitor with the moderation bot?

asah• 8 years ago

+1 - I'm curious as well.

harryh• 8 years ago

"because of the grey area of our tech"

"told us straight out that it would and we should move"

Sounds shady. I bet this would make more sense if OP explained what his company actually does.

purerandomness• 8 years ago

The point is that anyone could fall into that category when laws change.

Imagine you're running a cosplay community, and all of a sudden all your content is being deleted because the SESTA/FOSTA bill gets passed in a country where your "cloud" happens to reside in: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/03/25/0614209/sex-wor...

pests• 8 years ago

I know they specifically ban cryptocurrency mining on their free credit / tier. Even called out on their public product pages.

I assumed they could tell that via CPU usage with they already monitor for quotas.

ma2rten2• 8 years ago

What gray area are you in?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC2• 8 years ago

Nicely, resiliently built, good solid stuff.

Erm ... no, evidently not?

halbritt15• 8 years ago

Projects in the context of GCP can encompass all the necessary infrastructure to build a highly available service using standard practices. There's no indication anywhere from GCP themselves that a project could be a domain of failure. If asked, I doubt they would consider it as such.

A prudent person might consider a cloud provider to be a domain of failure and choose a multi-cloud option, which would probably be the correct way to address this resiliency issue. However, that's not really an appropriate approach for an early stage startup, where availability is generally not that much of a concern.

halbritt15• 8 years ago

This occasionally happens with gsuite users as well. Businesses lose access to all their email and documents.

Good times.

AlexCoventry• 8 years ago

the grey area of our tech

Cryptocurrency?

IloveHN84• 8 years ago

Blockchain for sure

hartator• 8 years ago

I am really curious, what was the business?

setquk3• 8 years ago

I’m starting to favour buying physical rack space again and running everything 2005 style with a light weight ansible layer. As long as your workload is predictable, the lock in, unpredictability, navigation through the maze of billing, weird rules and what-the-fuckism you have to deal with on a daily basis is merely trading one vendor specific hell for another. Your knowledge isn’t transferable between cloud vendors either so I’d rather have a hell I'm totally in control of and of which the knowledge has some retention value and will move around vendors no problems. You can also span vendors then thus avoiding the whole all eggs in one basket problem.

TAForObvReasons• 8 years ago

More importantly, there is a wealth of competent labor in the relatively stable area of maintaining physical servers (both on the hardware and software side). The modern cloud services move fast and break things, leading to a general shortage of resources and competent people. As a business, even if slightly more expensive initially, it makes more sense to start lower and work up to the cloud services as the need presents itself.

bitL3• 8 years ago

Hybrid is what you are looking for. Have a rack or two for your core and rent everything else from multiple cloud vendors, integrated with whatever orchestration you are running on your own racks (K8s? DC/OS? Ansible?).

tootie3• 8 years ago

You can federate Kubernetes across your own rack and one or more public cloud providers.

mlosapio• 8 years ago

This needs more upvotes

apple4ever• 8 years ago

That's exactly what we are thinking too. We've looked HARD into AWS/GCP/Azure, but for all the reasons you mentioned we don't want to go that route. Owning the entire stack is so much cheaper, both money and time wise.

bitL3• 8 years ago

I can tell a similar story with Amazon MWS, where even if we had access to "human support", it felt like talking to some bad ML, not understanding what we were saying. Ultimately that start up was disbanded, never violating any rule they had, but flagged because of a false positive, and we couldn't even prove we didn't violate anything because we didn't even go live yet. It felt Kafkaesque, punishing one of a myriad possible intents due to malfunctioning ML, with no recourse.

Maybe support just needed to satisfy their quota of kicked out companies for the month, who knows?

stickdogg• 8 years ago

Lol. That's definitely a possibility.

kerng3• 8 years ago

Thanks for sharing, I thought maybe it was a one off - it helps to avoid similar issues and luckily there is plenty of cloud competition.

pvg• 8 years ago

because of the grey area of our tech

The nature of the tech in question seems important in this story.

S3raph• 8 years ago

Is it only me or does it seem if you are not a "famous" person that has a lot of public visibility and is able to create pressure through a tweet or blog post you are lost, no number to call, no mail to write. Over the years I saw a lot of similar stories, youtube or in general "google accounts" blocked for no clear reason and no way to contact somebody to solve the issue... kinda scary...

nodesocket2• 8 years ago

I've gotta whole heartily disagree. I've never encountered this on GCE. I run a DevOps consulting company and for standard EC2/machines I much prefer GCP. It's not even close. AWS for the most part lacks any or little user experience testing on UI's and developer interfaces. AWS region specific resources are a nightmare, billing on GCP with sustained use and custom machine types is vastly superior. Disks are much easier to grok, no provisioned IOPS, EBS optimized, enhanced networking hoopla.

By chance are you located out of the United States? These are not downtime issues, but anti-fraud prevention and finance issues.

deerpig• 8 years ago

I've noticed that over the last few years it's become increasingly difficult to do things with US based services (especially banking) if you are outside of the US. And this goes double if you are a US citizen with no ties to the States other than citizenship. Americans as a general rule have never been terribly adept at anything international; banking, languages, or even base geography. We have offices in Cambodia and Laos and I have been told by more than one US based-service/company that Laos is not a real country. I suppose they think the .la domain stands for Los Angeles :) We are looking to set up an office in Hong Kong or Singapore and use that to deal with Western countries. But we're a small not-for-profit operation and HK and Singapore are EXPENSIVE.

ucaetano3• 8 years ago

Sounds like "we were doing something sketchy, got caught, but somehow it isn't our fault".

ithkuil3• 8 years ago

It can happen to you too: you get hacked, hackers run arbitrary code in your account

rullelito• 8 years ago

Was it porn or cryptos?

dilyevsky• 8 years ago

No truly production and especially revenue critical dependency should go on the card. Have your lawyer/licensing person sign agreement with them with actual sla and customer support. If it’s not worth your time you shouldn’t complain when you loose it.

Latteland2• 8 years ago

That's a great point. These cloud hosting companies don't make this a natural evolution though, because there's no human to talk to, you start tiny and increase your usage over time. But every company depending on something and paying serious money should have a specific agreement. I wonder if this could still happen though, even if you have a separate contract.

sargun5• 8 years ago

Once you hit a certain spend, Google contacts you and asks you to sign a thing.

keypusher• 8 years ago

These cloud hosting companies don't make this a natural evolution though, because there's no human to talk to

This is not true at all. Once you start spending real money on GCP or AWS, they will reach out to you. You will probably sign a support contract and have an account manager at that point. Or you might go with enterprise support where you have dedicated technical assets within the company that can help with case escalation, architecture review, billing optimization, etc.

e40• 8 years ago

Is this possible for GCP? Definitely seems the way to go.

manigandham8• 8 years ago

Yes they have invoice-based billing that you can apply for: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/invoiced-billin...

mikeyr0x5• 8 years ago

+1!

radimm• 8 years ago

Amen to that. Once you reach 1,000 USD monthly you can switch to regular invoiced account (subjected to verification) and you have dedicated account manager.

quickthrower22• 8 years ago

Yeah I couldn't get my head around this bit:

What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything — years of work — millions of dollars in lost revenue.

zmmmmm• 8 years ago

Indeed, presumably they were then also at the mercy of the credit card company cancelling or declining the card at the critical billing renewal moment.

JetSpiegel• 8 years ago

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoPlansNoPrototy...

snowwindwaves• 8 years ago

Usually there are a bunch of comments about power plants being connected to the internet. I doubt the connections from the control rooms or cloud back to the machines are read only unless they have protocol level filters to remove write commands from the wan to plant networks.

Just the way it is unless it is nuclear plant probably.

mark-ruwt7• 8 years ago

If maximum uptime is critical to the business, your infrastructure should be cross-provider.

I've been running three providers as peers (DO, Linode, Vultr) as a one-man shop for years, and I sleep better at night knowing that no one intern can fatfinger code that takes me offline.

nullgeo3• 8 years ago

What kind of business do you run? Can you explain a bit about how your systems in different providers are connected?

mark-ruwt7• 8 years ago

Surely! Our business is mainly an API that B-to-B customers consume. The strategy is to create identical "pods" in different cities across different providers on identical distros. Between Vultr, Linode, and DO, that's 20+ cities you could place a pod in the States alone. Each pod has a proxy up front, a database slave, and a pair of app server and cache machines.

Ignoring tweaks for international customers, each proxy is in an A record round-robin with health checks via Route 53. US-based requests get forwarded to one of the pods, and the proxy either handles the request with local servers, or points to servers in another pod if it has servers that are down. If any pod has a power outage or goes down for any reason, Route 53 automatically pulls the entire pod out of the rotation. If an entire provider goes dark, all of the pods get pulled out of the rotation, but all the others keep running.

CSDude• 8 years ago

All those are VPS providers, it is hard when you use other services of vendors

mark-ruwt7• 8 years ago

Agreed! My take is that you don't have to, you shouldn't.

PretzelFisch• 8 years ago

At that Point wouldn't hosting it yourself running on something like vmware vsphere be a simpler option? At least you would have a nice hardware abstraction and a consistent api to build your tooling on.

mark-ruwt7• 8 years ago

I hear you. For me, the abstraction is the Linux distro. Build scripts abstract out creating a clean, secure box before installing any custom software, so regardless of the provider, every machine is exactly the same.

Scarbutt• 8 years ago

you really can't compare switching between generic vps providers from switching between the big cloud providers that provide lots of more useful services.

mark-ruwt7• 8 years ago

It is a very different model, but my take is that you shouldn't be building anything on one provider that you couldn't easily move over to another. Provider lock-in is scary.

ryan-c4• 8 years ago

Your domain registrar can probably still hose you. Where's your DNS hosted?

mark-ruwt7• 8 years ago

Very true! I have a script that automatically commits any DNS changes to source control, so if Route 53 bites it I could quickly move somewhere else, but you're right, on the off chance my registrar decides to vanish, there'll be some panicking.

throwaway10701• 8 years ago

As someone who is currently struggling with Google Cloud's mediocre support, this is not surprising. We pay lots of money for support and have multiple points of contact but all tickets are routed through front-line support who have no context and completely isolate you from what's going on. For highly technical users the worst support is to get fed through the standard playbook ("have you tried turning it off and on again?") when you're dealing with an outage. Especially since the best case is your support person playing go-between with the many, siloed teams trying to troubleshoot an issue while they apparently try to pass the buck.

Not to mention the lack of visibility in changes - it seems like everything is constantly running at multiple versions that can change suddenly with no notice, and if that breaks your use case they don't really seem to know or care. It feels like there's miles of difference between the SRE book and how their cloud teams operate in practice.

mathattack• 8 years ago

I’ve seen other companies walk away from Google Cloud for similar reasons. Automate everything to scale doesn’t work for the Fortune 500. They should absolutely own this market.

tyingq2• 8 years ago

This is why AWS and Azure continue to gain market share in cloud, while Google remains relativity stagnant, despite (in many cases) superior technology.

Their sales staff is arrogant and has no idea how to sell into F500 type companies.

Source: 10+ meetings, with different clients, I attended where the Google sales pitch was basically "we are smarter than you, and you will succumb". The Borg approach. Someone needs to revamp the G sales and support approach if they want to grow in the cloud space.

JPKab• 8 years ago

Absolutely.

It blows my mind that GCloud, with arguably superior tech and performance compared to AWS/Azure, can't handle support. I have my own horror stories from 2 years ago, but still they haven't fixed it.

Google just doesn't seem to be able to focus on products that requires service and customer support. Maybe they just don't care about it while they have an infinite revenue stream from search and advertising. Whatever it is, they should be humiliated.

I love the tech, and the ux details like in browser SSH (AWS hasn't improved UX EVER) but they can't get support right? Amazing.

foobarbazetc3• 8 years ago

Are you on insiders? Only way to get anyone to care.

ikiris3• 8 years ago

Insiders?

gcbirzan2• 8 years ago

Let's see if the current logging thread will result in anything. :-)

jazoom12• 8 years ago

I'd just like to take this opportunity to praise Vultr. I've been using them for years and their support has always been good, and contrary to every other growing company, has been getting better over time.

I had an issue with my servers 2 days ago and I got a reply to my ticket within 1 minute. Follow-up replies were also very fast.

The person I was talking to was a system administrator who understood what I was talking about and could actually solve problems on the spot. He is actually the same person who answered my support requests last year. I don't know if that's a happy accident or if they try to keep the same support staff answering for the same clients. He was answering my requests consistently for 2 days this time.

I am not a big budget customer. AWS and GCP wouldn't think anything of me.

Thank you Vultr for supporting your product properly. And thanks Eric. You are very helpful!

com2kid2• 8 years ago

Google Cloud provides more than just VMs and Containers. It has a bunch of services backed in, from a variety of databases such as Firebase (that have powerful built in subscription and eventing systems) to fully baked in Auth, (Google will even handle doing two factor for you!) to assisting with certain types of machine learning.

Vultr looks like they provide more traditional services with a few extra niceties on top.

Within Google's infrastructure, I can deploy a new HTTPS REST endpoint with a .js file and 1 console command.

Could I set up an ecosystem on a Vultr VM to do the same? Sure, it isn't magic. But GCP's entire value prop is that they've already done a lot of that work for you, and as someone running a startup, I was able to go from "I have this idea" to "I have this REST endpoint" in couple of days, without worrying about managing infrastructure.

That said, articles like this always worry me. I've never seen an article that says "Wow Google's support team really helped out!"

dang3• 8 years ago

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. That's a strict reduction in signal/noise ratio, which mars your otherwise fine comment. We're trying for the opposite here.

Downvotes can irritate, but there are at least two balms that don't involve adding noise to the threads. One is to remember that people sometimes simply misclick. The other is that unfairly downvoted comments mostly end up getting corrective upvotes from fair-minded community members (as happened with yours here).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

user59944612• 8 years ago

If it can make you feel any better, the AWS support is the same.

coredog64• 8 years ago

It costs a pretty penny, but I’m very happy with AWS enterprise support. When we had a ticket that we didn’t escalate get a crappy answer, our TAM escalated on his own initiative to get us a better answer.

bonesss3• 8 years ago

AWS sends you emails 9 months in advance of needing to restart individual EC2 instances (with calm, helpful reminders all the way through). IME, they're also really good about pro-active customer outreach and meaningful product newsletters... Even for tiny installations (ie less than $10K yearly).

Anecdotally: I've been an MS gold partner in a bunch of different contexts for years. The experiences I had as 'small fish' techie with AWS were on par or better. YMMV, of course, but I'd be more comfortable putting my Enterprise in the hands of AWS support than MS's (despite MS being really good in that space).

hknd2• 8 years ago

Higher paying (premium) customers actually get premium support in GCP, e.g. SRE who can get paged on an outage.

Prices seem high though: https://cloud.google.com/support/?options=premium-support#op...

ccleve• 8 years ago

This is fatal. I have a small pilot project on Google Cloud. Considering putting up a much larger system. Not now.

The costs of Google may be comparable or lower than other services, but they don't seem to get that risk is a cost. Risk can be your biggest cost. And they've amplified that risk unnecessarily and shifted it to the customer. Fatal, as I said.

timc3• 8 years ago

Making a decision purely based upon some posts on HN and the original artical isn’t a good idea either as there is little data on how often this happens and how often (and pulling the plug could happen with another IAAS). You need to weigh up your options for risk management based upon how critical your project is, the amount of time/money you have to solve the issues.

You might never see this happen to your GCP account in it’s lifetime.

wiorcite• 8 years ago

I lost Gmail account (locked due phone verification)[lost on holiday sim card] all my photo from vacation important email is gone (done backup day before) and that was like 3 years ego still waiting for explanation from Google 20 email send no response

markbnj3• 8 years ago

I can't speak to the specific incident. We've been running almost 400 servers (instances and k8s cluster nodes) for over a year on GCP and we've been quite happy with the performance and reliability, as well as the support response when we have needed it. I did want to address this comment...

What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything — years of work — millions of dollars in lost revenue.

You should never be in this position. If this were to happen to us we would be able to create a new project with a different payment instrument, and provision it from the ground up with terraform, puppet and helm scripts. The only thing we would have to fix up manually are some DNS records and we could probably have everything back up in a few hours. Eventually when we have moved all of our services to k8s I would expect to be able to do this even on a different cloud provider if that were necessary.

deltateam3• 8 years ago

I wrote a similar comment, thats what the best practices are for

jacquesm11• 8 years ago

Restarting the service from scratch is one thing, but what about all your data? Some of these services have 100's T's of data hanging of them and if Google would delete that because of some perceived violation of their terms then that is not something you can recover from in a couple of hours, if at all.

This is one of the reasons I always implore people to have a backup of their data with another provider or at least under a different account. That protects against all kinds of accidents but also against malice.

pavs9• 8 years ago

Backup is a thing. If your company is making millions of dollars off your business you should have a redundant backup of everything including (especially) your data.

ma2rten2• 8 years ago

Huh? You can provision new servers, but you can't just easily move over all the data, can you?

markbnj3• 8 years ago

Easily? That's in the eye of the person doing the work I guess. But we have backups and could restore our databases.

lotyrin• 8 years ago

Why not? You should have backup strategy with business-acceptable RPO/RTO.

samfisher83• 8 years ago

We seem to hear a lot of bad google customer support stories. I guess it really shouldn't be surprising. Amazon grew as a company that put customers first. Google is kind of known for not doing that. They shut down services all the time. They don't really put an emphasis on customer support.

xt00• 8 years ago

I’ve used AWS support many times and it’s actually really awesome. You can ask them basically anything and they have experts on everything. Really impressive. Yes you pay every month for it but it’s really good.

sargun5• 8 years ago

It sounds like this person didn’t pay for support.

balls1875• 8 years ago

AWS Billing support is Free. And it's also equally awesome.

Paid support tiers (as far as I know) are for deeper system level diagnostics.

jacquesm11• 8 years ago

That's pretty bad of Google. I just looked in detail at a company using Google Cloud exclusively for their infra and the application is somewhat similar to what these guys are doing. I'll pass the article on to them. Thanks for posting this.

deltateam3• 8 years ago

We would have lost everything — years of work

Okay that sounds like a greater systemic problem.

You should be have been able to deploy your git repository on another system pretty quickly, as well as have your own backups of your database.

The most time consuming thing should be setting up the environment variables.

Let me see, what else would be tricky: if you are using google analytics that data might be gone, but your other metrics package should have had many snapshots of that data too

CyanLite2• 8 years ago

Not OP, but according to his business case, being down for a few days could bankrupt the company. Re-deploying from git doesn't solve the use-case of your public cloud provider pulling the plug on your machines.

hedora• 8 years ago

From a Google shareholder’s perspective, this approach is unacceptable:

The only way to use their product safely is to engineer your entire business so that cloud providers are completely interchangeable.

Forcing the entire industry to pay the cost of transparently switching upfront completely commoditizes cloud providers, which means they’ll no longer be able to charge a sustainable markup for their offerings.

This is fiscally negligent. Upper management should be fired.

However, it’s great for the rest of the industry — Google nukes a few random startups from orbit, some VCs take a bath, early and mid-range adopters bleed money engineering open source workarounds, and everone else’s cloud costs drop to the marginal costs of electricity and silicon.

deltateam3• 8 years ago

its not even a premature optimization to make completely interchangeable server code these days.

the shareholders should be proud that such naivete towards vendor lock is still rampant

kuwze• 8 years ago

I wonder what support option[0] they had from GCP.

https://cloud.google.com/support/?options=premium-support#op...

jdietrich• 8 years ago

If you use cloud services, a crucial scenario in your disaster recovery planning is "what if a cloud provider suddenly cuts us off?". It's a single point of failure akin to "what if a DC gets demolished by a hurricane?" or "what if a sysadmin gets hit by a bus?". If you don't have a plan for those scenarios, you're playing with fire.

https://libcloud.apache.org/

Bahamut• 8 years ago

This story gives evidence to something I have seen from Google, and why I refuse to pay them cash for a service ever again, much less critical ones - Google customer service is bad by design. I have never seen a company so arrogant and opaque/untransparent as them

mikeyr0x5• 8 years ago

Please remember Google Cloud is a multi-tenant public cloud and in order run a multi-tenant environment providers have to monitor usage, users, billing, and take precautionary measures at times when usage or account activity is sensed to be irregular. Some of this management is done automatically by systems preserving QoS and monitoring for fraud or abuse.

This seems like a billing issue. If they had offline billing and monthly invoicing (enterprise agreement) I do not believe this issue would have happened.

If you are running an enterprise business and do not have enterprise support and an enterprise relationship with the provider, you may be doing something wrong on your end. It sounds like the author of this post does not have an account team and hasn't take the appropriate steps to establish an enterprise relationship with their provider. They are running a consumer account which is fine in many many cases, but may not be fine for a company that requires absolutely no service interruptions.

IMO, the time this issue was resolved by the automated process (20 mins) is not too bad for consumer cloud services. Most likely this issue could have been avoided if the customer had an enterprise relationship (offline billing/invoicing, support, TAM, account flagging, etc, etc) with Google Cloud.

ngrilly• 8 years ago

A "consumer account"? I don't know what you're talking about. This is Google Cloud, not Spotify. I don't know a lot of "consumers" spending hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars or more per month on Google Cloud. And paying bills by wire transfer instead of credit card doesn't change anything to the issue discussed here.

eicnix• 8 years ago

Individual projects without a GCP organization association are probably treated as consumer accounts.

mikeyr0x5• 8 years ago

Hundreds or thousands is easily spent by 'consumers' on any public cloud. Think about it.

Paying bills offline via invoice establishes a enterprise agreement with cloud providers. It does in fact change everything with the issue discussed here. They wouldn't be taken offline due to an issue with the credit card payment.

namibj• 8 years ago

In Germany, maybe even all of europe you need a tax ID which you, at least as far as the type they require is concerned, only get as a business, not a consumer. I actually tried due to the relatively easy way to get a fancy, reliable network (I kind of admire their global SDN that can push within 5% of line rate with no meaningful, added packet loss (apart from the minimal amount due to random cosmic rays and similar baseline effects).

ehsankia• 8 years ago

I'm a hobby programmer who runs a few small projects on GCP. My personal spending is smaller than OPs, but as mentioned elsewhere, once you hit a certain threshold, they will contact you to offer switching to a business account. Obviously they're not gonna force you to switch if you don't want to, but then don't complain for not getting business level support.

stickfigure• 8 years ago

Terrifying.

I'm curious though, did you have multiple credit cards on file with your Google billing account? I'm under the impression that this is part of their intended strategy for avoiding service interruption, but I'd like to know if it actually works that way.

(I took this as a reminder to add a second card to my account)

warrentr2• 8 years ago

This is very concerning but can happen on AWS as well. July 4th last year at about 4PM PST amazon silently shutdown our primary load balancer (ALB) due to some copyright complaint. This took out our main api and several dependent apps. We were able to get a tech support agent on the phone but he wasn't able to determine why this happened for several hours. Eventually we figured out that another department within amazon was responsible for pulling down the alb in an undetectable way. Ironically we are now in the process of moving from aws -> gcp.

halbritt15• 8 years ago

You're going to have to go multi-cloud if you truly want to insulate yourselves from this sort of problem.

If and when you do, give serious consideration to how you handle DNS.

brightball4• 8 years ago

Fwiw, Ansible makes the multicloud thing pretty straightforward as long as you aren’t married to services that only work for a specific cloud provider.

For that, you should consider setting up multiple accounts to isolate those services from the portable ones.

cpeterso• 8 years ago

What are popular multi cloud solutions if you use AWS or GCP services that have proprietary APIs? Are there frameworks that paper over the API differences?

wwweston• 8 years ago

What's the DNS solution here? Something like Cloudflare or Edge?

duxup2• 8 years ago

They shutdown just the load balancer?

Forgive my ignorance but that seems like a weird choice rather than cutting access to the servers or in some more formal ways for copyright...

Also kinda concernit that multiple departments can take enforcement type action and others not know it. That seems way disorganized / recipe for diasater.

thinkmassive• 8 years ago

Whomever reported the violation probably identified the public IP address of the ALB and notified Amazon

zamalek2• 8 years ago

Ironically we are now in the process of moving from aws -> gcp.

Why not Azure? They have a solid platform and (at least for a MSFT partner) their support is top-notch.

jnsaff22• 8 years ago

I respectfully disagree. I have worked on two projects with Azure both with big accounts, one even so big that we had senior Azure people sitting in our teams. Both had the highest possible support contract.

Yet their support didn't ever solve a problem within their SLA's and sometimes critical level tickets were hanging for months.

Plus my impression is that whereas AWS (and possibly Google) clouds are built by engineers using best practices and logic, Azure products felt always very much marketing driven e.g. marketing gave engineering a list of features to launch and engineering did the minimum effort possible to have the corresponding box ticked. I absolutely hated working on Azure and now won't accept any contract on it.

Documentation is horrible or non-existing, things just don't work, have weird limitations or transient deployment errors, super weird architectural and implementation choices + you never escape the clunkyness of the MS legacy with for example AD.

bitL3• 8 years ago

Can't you end-to-end encrypt your data, so that Amazon can't run their copyright filters over them?

warrentr2• 8 years ago

In this case the complaint was against some image(s) we were publicly hosting. We've taken steps to isolate our file hosting from the rest of the system in case this were to happen again. We only host images for fashion blog posts written by staff so I imagine other aws customers have had a much worse time in this regard.

joecot• 8 years ago

My coworker is running a hosted affiliate tracking system on AWS as part of our company. He regularly has to deal with AWS wanting to pull our servers because of email spam -- not because we're sending spam emails, but because some affiliate link is in a spam email that resolves to our server, and Spamhaus complained to AWS.

Usually this can get handled after a few days of aggravating emails back and forth, we get our client to ban the affiliate in question, and move on with our days with no downtime. But a few weeks ago my coworker came in to find our server taken offline, because AWS emailed him about a spam complaint on a Friday night, and they hadn't gotten a response by Sunday. It'd been down for hours before he realized.

They'd just null terminated the IP of the server, so he updated IPs in DNS real quick, but he then spent half a day both resolving the complaint, and then getting someone at AWS to say it wouldn't happen again. They supposedly put a flag on his account requiring upper management approval to disable something again, but we'll see if that works when it comes up again.

halbritt15• 8 years ago

I think this is another instance of GCP just being really, really terrible at interacting with customers. I'm biased a bit (in favor of GCP), I suppose in that I have a fair bit of infra in GCP and I really like it. I'll share a couple anecdotes.

Last year my team migrated most of our infrastructure out of AWS into GCP. We'd been running k8s with kops in AWS and really liked using GKE. We also developed a bizdev arrangement.

As I was scaling up my spend in GCP, I began purchasing committed use discounts. Roughly similar to reserved instances in AWS. I'd already made one purchase for around $5k a month and these are tied to a specific region and can't be moved. I went to purchase a second $5k block, and typo'd the request ending up with $5k worth of infra in us-central rather than us-west. The purchase doesn't go into effect until the following day and showed as "pending" in the console. No big deal, I thought, I'll just contact support and they'll fix it right away, I'm sure. I had this preconceived notion based on my experiences with AWS. I open a support request and about an hour later I get a response that basically tells me that once I've clicked the thing, there's no undoing it and have a nice day.

I've literally just erroneously spent $5k for infra in us-central that I can't use and their response was basically, "tough". $5k is a sufficiently large loss that I'd be inclined to burn a few hours of my legal team's time dealing with this issue, something I shared with the support person. After much hemming and hawing over the course of a few days, they eventually fixed the issue.

More recently, I've been dealing with an issue that is apparently called a "stockout".

Unlike AWS, GCP does not randomize their AZ names for each customer. This means that for any given region, the "A" availability zone is where most of the new infrastructure is going to land by default. Some time in May, we started seeing resource requests for persistent SSD failing in us-west1-a. The assumption is that it would clear up pretty quickly after an hour or two, but persisted. After about a day of this, we opened up a support case asking what was going on and explaining the need for some kind of visibility or metrics for this kind of issue. The response we received was that this issue was "exceedingly rare" which was why there was no visibility and that it would be rectified shortly, but couldn't be given any specific timeline.

I followed up with my account rep, he escalated to a "customer engineer" who read the support engineers notes and elaborated how "rare" this event was and how unlikely it was to recur. Again, I contacted my account rep and explained my unhappiness with the qualitative responses from "engineers" and that I needed quite a bit more information on which to act. He was sympathetic throughout this whole process escalating inside the organization as needed and shared with me some fairly candid information that I couldn't get from anyone else.

Apparently, the issue is called "stockout" and us-west1-a had a long history of them. The issues had been getting progressively worse from the beginning of the year and at this time, this AZ was the most notorious of any in any region. Basically, the support engineer either patently lied or was just making stuff up. Also, I shared with my GCP rep how AWS load-balances across AZs. He promised to pass that along.

The moral of the story is that if you want to be in us-west, then maybe try us-west1-c. Also, GCP is a relatively young arm of a well-established company that has a terrible reputation of being able to communicate with consumers. They'll eventually figure it out, it will just take some time.

whyagaindavid• 8 years ago

Sad to know such events. Can anyone comment on what would be the number of events (%) lead to tipping point- move people to avoid any SaaS? Anyone experienced such tipping points that led to overall change in trend especially in other industries?

SoulMan• 8 years ago

I can echo with the sentiment here. There have been a few times, they have broken backward compatibility resulting in our production outage without even new deployment. For example the BigQuery client library suddenly started breaking because they had rolled out some changes from the API contract the library was calling. When we reached out to support they took it very lightly saying why are we even using "the ancient version of library", Ok fair enough we upgraded the library to the recommended version but alas! the dataflow library started breaking due to this new upgrade. For next few hours support just kept on playing binary search of a version which was compatible with both bigQuery and dataflow while the production was down.

The worst part is that when we did post morterm and asked Google why the support resolution was so slow despite being "the privileged" customer, their answer was that the P1 SLA was only to respond within 15 minutes there is no SLA for resolution. Most of the "response" that were getting was that a new support guy has taken over in a new time zone which is the most useless information for us.

We are seriously thinking of moving to another cloud vendor.

user59944612• 8 years ago

In my experience, the support from the other clouds is equally useless if not worse.

AWS would never admit that anything is wrong from their side.

Animats2• 8 years ago

Does Google Cloud offer a service where they are bound by contract not to do this? If not, no business should use them.

sargun5• 8 years ago

Yes

Animats2• 8 years ago

Is it a lot more expensive?

bhouston• 8 years ago

I had the company visa blocked temporarily for suspicious activity twice in the last 6 years and no one shut their service off, but I got a lot of warnings. Seems like a really shitty thing for google to do.

Maybe for critical accounts you need to have a backup visa on file with Google cloud with in case the first dies for security reasons.

A single visa is a single point of failure in an otherwise redundant systemm

mark_l_watson• 8 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. For my consumer Google account (google play music, YouTube red, buying movies, app engine) I can add additional payment methods https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/payment-methods

After reading this article, I am probably going to do this.

iblaine• 8 years ago

"Why you should not use Google Cloud" if you're a small business. A large business will have contacts, either on their own or through a consulting firm, that can call Google employees and get help. As a small company, you're at the mercy of what Google thinks is adequate support for the masses.

flossball• 8 years ago

This is a hallmark of Google's lack of customer service. They used to use the same filtering alg on customer search feeds as public. The system was a grey list of some sort and the client was worth about 1m in ads a day to them. Never the less, once a month it would get blocked. Sometimes for over a day before someone read the email complaint and fixed it. We had no phone, chat, or any other access to them. They have no clue how to run a business nor do they care. Never partner with them.

londons_explore2• 8 years ago

GCP allows multiple payment methods.

You should always have at least two payment methods on file with them for anything important.

That way if one gets flagged for fraud, services won't be suspended.

londons_explore2• 8 years ago

This fraud flag is caused by your credit card being found in a leaked list of card numbers somewhere.

They suspect you are a fraudster because you are using a stolen card.

Either sign a proper SLA agreement with Google (which gives you 30 days to pay their bills by any form, and therefore you get 30 days notice before they pull the plug), or have two forms of payment on file. Preferably, don't use your GCP credit card at dodgy online retailers too...

ikiris3• 8 years ago

At least someone gets it.

kerng3• 8 years ago

So, you think this is okay?

sn41• 8 years ago

I may be missing something, so help me out here... I get the impression that the author was not told the precise reason why the activity was suspicious. Wouldn't a precise error message, if not actually a human interface, been helpful? Why the generic "suspicious activity" warning?

It seemed very Kafkaesque to me, getting tried and convicted without any mention of the crime or charge. I think the author is justified in his disapproval.

oxplot• 8 years ago

Either sign a proper SLA agreement with Google

How do you do that?

balls1875• 8 years ago

Preferably, don't use your GCP credit card at dodgy online retailers too...

Or at gas stations, ATMs, or any other place where someone can install a skimmer.

otis_inf3• 8 years ago

Or you know, Google could have emailed them, told them exactly that and waited for a response before pulling the plug on the servers.

While you make sense from Google's PoV, it doesn't from the customer's PoV. As google is a big corp, it's IMHO better to side with the customer here, as next time it might be you who's getting screwed over by Google/other corp.

manigandham8• 8 years ago

Google just doesn't have the talent, skills, or knowledge for dealing with business customers. They don't have competition in adtech and so never learned, but that doesn't work with GCP. They have great technical features but don't realize that's not what matters to a customer who wants their business to run smoothly.

We've gone through several account teams of our own that seem to be eager to help only to turn into radio silence once we actually need something. We have already moved mission-critical services to AWS and Azure, with GCP only running K8S and VMs for better pricing and performance.

GCP has good leadership now but it's clearly taking longer than it should to improve unfortunately.

paulie_a2• 8 years ago

I generally agree with you but there is one exception, Google fi has amazing support. I am surprised gcp wouldn't have similar support considering the obvious cost differences though.

manigandham8• 8 years ago

Google Fi is for consumers.

chevman• 8 years ago

This is a rookie mistake - create and host a mission critical part of your business (not just your backend infrastructure, your entire business) with a vendor that you have no real, vetted contract in place with?

Total clown show.

Take this as a lesson in risk management and don't fuck it up again.

cabaalis• 8 years ago

Am I alone in thinking critical infrastructure monitoring like this should be run on the metal in your own center? Sure, offload some data for processing and reporting to cloud providers. But I'm slightly worried that electrical grid technology is using something they cannot control, and freaking uptime robot (I use it also) instead of proper IT in a controlled facility.

jgalvez• 8 years ago

This happened to me in a project too. Everything went down due to their bogus fraud detection. I had a Kubernetes cluster down for over a day. Very unfortunate as I loved GCP :(

masterleep2• 8 years ago

Same here. Total nuke of the project with no warning even though we were an established paying customer, and there was no fraud involved.

glogla• 8 years ago

There's quite a lot of people talking about how this is their own fault, that they should have expected it, that they should have been prepared. Victim blaming, some would say, even.

But even if you assign blame to the OP for not expecting this, it doesn't look good, because the lesson here is "you shouldn't use google and if you do, expect them to fuck you over, for no reason, at any time".

wpietri• 8 years ago

Exactly. The whole point of using AWS, Google Cloud, etc, is that you get to stop thinking about certain classes of problems. An infrastructure provider that is unreliable cancels most of the value of using them for infrastructure.

mmt7• 8 years ago

Worse, they can potentially more than cancel it out, if they merely remove the "worrying about hardware" (yes, and network and load balancers and everything else) aspects, which are, at least, well understood by some us out on the market, and replace it with "worrying about the provider" where a failure scenario is, not only more opaque, but potentially catastrophic, since it's a single vendor with all the infrastructure.

It reminds me of AWS's opacity-as-antidote-to-worry with respect to hardware failures. If the underlying hardware fails, the EC2 instance on it just disappears (I've heard GCP handles this better, and AWS might now, as well). I like to point out that this doesn't differ much from the situation of running physical hardware (while ignoring the hardware monitoring), both from a "worry" burden perspective and from a "downtime from hardware failure" perspective.

matt_wulfeck• 8 years ago

Does google allow you to preauthorize your purchasing card? It seems like part of this is that they all of the sudden get suspicious about your billing information.

emilfihlman• 8 years ago

Here's the harsh truth:

If your stuff relies on "cloud" you are on your own.

freedomben• 8 years ago

Has anyone experienced anything like this on IaaS services like Heroku or Gigalixir?

nasmorn• 8 years ago

Google once shut down my employers App Store account for 3 days for some routine review. That didn’t just mean we didn’t get any money, that could be argued even. It meant we were simply off the store. Because some needed to see a TPS report

balls1875• 8 years ago

While not a cloud platform, I had an experience along the same vein with Stripe.

We're a health-care startup, and this past Saturday I got an email saying that due to the nature of our business, we were prohibited from using their payment platform (Credit Card companies have different risk profiles and charge accordingly--see Patereon v Adult Content Creators).

Rather than pull the plug immediately, they offered us a 5-day wind down period, and provided information on a competitor that takes on high-risk services.

Fortunately, the classification of our business was incorrect (we do not offer treatment nor perscription/pharma services), and after contacting their support via Email & Twitter, we resolved the issue in less than 24-hours.

So major kudos to Stripe for protecting their platform, WHILE also trying to do the right thing for the customers who run astray from the service agreement.

pge• 8 years ago

This highlights one of the challenges Google has going into the cloud market - they don’t have a history of serving enterprise customers and the organizational structure and processes to do that well. I think one of the reasons Microsoft has gotten cloud market share so quickly with Azure (in addition to bundling licenses with other products!) is that they have the experience with enterprise customers and the organization to serve them well (regardless of how Azure compares to GCP as a product). Supporting enterprise customers is what they have always done - not so with Google (and Amazon had to learn that as well).

jpollock• 8 years ago

This is a standard risk with any attempt to remain anonymous with a supplier. The supplier, since they don't know you, and therefore can't trust you, will not offer much credit.

Cards get skimmed all the time. When a card gets skimmed, the issuer informs everyone who is making recurring purchases with that card "Hey, this card was skimmed, it's dead".

If someone has a recurring charge attached to that account, the recurring charge will go bad. If this is an appreciable number of cloud services which are billed by the second, this can happen very, very quickly and without you knowing. Remember, sometimes the issuer informs you that the card was skimmed, which you will receive after all the automated systems have been told.

So, the cloud provider gets the cancel, and terminates the card. It then looks around sees the recurring charge, takes a look at your servers racking up $$ they can't recoup and the system goes "we don't know this person, they buy stuff from us, but we haven't analysed their credit. Are they good for the debt? We've never given them credit before. Better cut them off until they get in touch."

If only they had signed an enterprise agreement and gotten credit terms. It could still be paid with a credit card, but the supplier would say "They're good for $X, let it ride and tell them they'll be cut off soon". They can even attach multiple methods of payment to the account, where, for example, a second card with a different bank is used as a backup. Having a single card is a single point of failure in the system!

In closing, imagine you're a cryptocoin miner who uses stolen cards to mine on cloud services. What does that look like to the cloud provider?

Yep, someone signs up for cloud services, starts racking up large bills and then the card is flagged as stolen.

hknd2• 8 years ago

It looks like they used a personal GCP account for their multi-million dollar business.

Would be interested to see what would've happened if they would've used a business account.

johnsea• 8 years ago

Horrible. This reminds me of travels in 3rd world countries where sometimes the electricity just dropped out. Ha, never would have thought that the one Google would occasionally become like this...

oooooof• 8 years ago

Wow if that’s possible on google cloud then I agree wholeheartedly.... don’t risk your business by using google cloud.

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

assets need to be monitored 24/7 to keep up/down with the needs of the power grid and the power purchase agreements made

If you're doing something this mission critical, you have to have an SLA with your cloud provider.

shaohua• 8 years ago

I have a similar story. I submitted a ticket to increase my GPU quota. Then my account was suspended, because CSR think the account is committing fraud. At that moment, I have a valid payment method and have been using GCP for a couple of weeks. Only after I prepaid $200 and uploaded a bunch of documents including credit card pictures and ID pictures, my account was restored.

You heard me right, I prepaid them so that my account can be restored.

I miss AWS sometimes...

jopsen• 8 years ago

Honestly, if your not big enough to setup invoicing an option to always prepay wouldn't be so bad. If it reduces risks if interrupts.

danielrhodes• 8 years ago

Larger companies on AWS will spread their infra across multiple accounts to deal with this risk.

kerng3• 8 years ago

Wow, haven't heard of a story like this yet where a cloud provider provider shuts down all resources without warning...

Luckily, with AWS and Azure there is great competition to move to.

janment• 8 years ago

Google's custom service is ridiculous. They ever suddenly emailed me that my merchant earning (accumulated in about three years) will be escheated to nation government until I provide valid payment information in one month. However, for some reason. it will take more than one month for me to get a valid payment information.

Then they really escheated my earning to some a nation government after 30 days. However when I requested them for the escheatment ID so that I can contact that nation government to find my money back, they said they don't have the ID! They eascheated my money without any recording! Which is almost the same as throwing my money in ocean.

cameldrv• 8 years ago

This is the problem with being excessively metrics-driven. They have a fraud problem, and there's some low-dollar customer that their algorithm determines is say a 20% chance of fraud. They know that 80% of the non-fradulent people will just upload their ID or whatever immediately, and they shut down all the fraud right away. Their fraud metrics look great, and the 20% of customers that had a problem have low CLV so who cares? It's not worth the CSR to sort it out, and anyhow, the CSR could just get socially engineered. The problem is that the 20% are going to talk to other people about their nightmare experiences.

It may not be expensive to Google to lose the business, but it's very expensive for the customer. Google's offering is now non-competitive if you aren't doing things at enterprise scale. Of course many of Google's best clients will start out as small ones. The metrics won't capture the long-term repetitional damage that's being done by these policies.

nimbosa• 8 years ago

this exactly describes Google policy on small fish, by neglecting their concerns, Google gets a lot of negative reputation from small startups who spread the word on forums like this, making their technical innovation largely irrelevant to their future success

oppositelock• 8 years ago

This has happened to me. Google's billing system had a glitch, and all of a sudden, an old bill which was paid years ago became unpaid. Google immediately tore down everything in my account without notice due to non-payment.

If something like this ever happens in AWS, they email you, call you, give you a grace period, and generally, do their best to avoid affecting your infrastructure.

GCP is getting better, but it's not ready for anything other than science fair experiments.

Lectem• 8 years ago

I wouldnt trust google with anything anymore. Their customer support (entreprise or not) always sucked. They're always "right". You can only suffer the damage silently unless you're worth millions for them. People should come to realize that it's been years google is NOT your friend.

Upvoter33• 8 years ago

The weird thing here is that inside google, support is great. Meaning that when people are building products for other google engineers, they go way above and beyond what is needed to help each other out. Somehow, they are not able to transition that to external customers.

FloNeu• 8 years ago

No doubt that this is horrible practice and customer service on googles-side - but at the hypotethical question - what if the card holder is unreachable blabla - we loose years of work etc. Well if you are not professional enough to back-up your system regularly you should loose everthing and it's your fault to begin with... For real - google is not the only one who should step up there game... Only because it's in the cloud now, doesn't mean you should ignore decades old best-practices... servers die, hard-drives die - people with passwords die... handling stuff like that is part of your job...

ediazrod• 8 years ago

Sorry but this happened because Google and aws lack of the vision of run true Enterprise companies. I see this situation on azure many times and in the end time try lo locate to te comercial people behind of this customer .. it is a lack of the Enterprise vision

exabrial• 8 years ago

I guess Google treats their paying cloud subscribers like their revenue generating YouTube content generators. Moderately surprised...

myrandomcomment• 8 years ago

The first requirement of any production system is redundancy. It sound like on top of the layers for cpu, storage, network and application, the new requiment is redundant cloud platform providers.

gcpsupport2• 8 years ago

I work here in Google Cloud Platform Support.

First, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue. Protecting our customers and systems is top priority. This incident is a good example where we didn’t do a good job. We know we must do better. And to answer OP’s final message: GCP Team is listening.

Our team has been in touch with OP over what happened and will continue digging into the issue. We will be doing a full review in the coming days and make improvements not only to detection but to communications for when these incidents do occur.

seanvk• 8 years ago

I think it starts with ensuring that you have staff that actually review an action before it takes place. Relying on automation can be catastrophic for someone like OP.

shacharz• 8 years ago

What really underlines this blog and thread is that as of the moment of writing this comment, there's no official answer from Google, or even a non official one from an employee. The feeling I get as a customer is that they just don't care.

gcpsupport2• 8 years ago

I did make a post below actually a few hours back and will copy and paste it below for reference. Rest assured that we are working on this one and are in contact directly with the customer. We hope to have more of an official response soon.

from below: I work here in Google Cloud Platform Support. First, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue. Protecting our customers and systems is top priority. This incident is a good example where we didn’t do a good job. We know we must do better. And to answer OP’s final message: GCP Team is listening.

masterleep2• 8 years ago

My company was another victim if you need another non-fraud case to look into.

SurenTer• 8 years ago

Google servivcces are great - unless something goes wrong. It seems googlers have never googled "support" :)

dzimine• 8 years ago

On top of "this sucks": such "fully automated" response is a violation of GDPR compliance that requires "right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller".

Stunning that Google cloud can get away with this.

anon12360238• 8 years ago

The writer - twitter handle @serverpunch - not only doesnt identify him/her self, they seem to have created a Twitter account just to shit on GCP.

What is the activity which got flagged as suspicious?

VendicarKahn• 8 years ago

I experienced exactly the same thing earlier this month. Due to "suspicious activity" on YouTube, Google suspended not only my YouTube account, but also Gmail, Google Chat, and ALL other services they provide, including their Cloud services.

They provide no explanation as to why the accounts are closed, and provide only a single form to appeal the situation.

In my case they refused to release the locks on their services so all information, all contacts, all files, all histories, all YouTube data, and everything else they store is now effectively lost with no means of getting the data back.

This was done without warning, and the account was locked due to "suspicious activity on YouTube".

Through Experimentation with a new account I found that the "suspicious activity" they were referring to was Criticism of the Trump Administration policy of kidnapping children from their parents.

Posting such criticism to the threads that follow stories by MSNBC and other news sources triggered Google to block YouTube and all other services they provide and to do so without warning or any explanation.

ConsultantEU• 8 years ago

We are currently conducting a study on behalf of the European Commission in order to have a better understanding of the nature, scope and scale of contract-related problems encountered by Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in EU in using cloud computing services. The purpose is to identify the problems that SMEs in the EU are encountering in order to reflect on possible ways to address them. To assist the European Commission with this task you are kindly invited to contact: eu.study.cloudcomputing@ro.ey.com

ClaudiaPopescu• 8 years ago

This sounds interesting! I have founded an SME and I have experienced issues w/ cloud computing, mainly data storage and problems with the contracts from providers. I will write you an email! Thanks!

Why you should not use Google Cloud

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