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Comment by abrookewood | Hacker News Reader

The problem (I suffer from it as well), is that people naturally feel that the corporate offerings from Google will mirror the experience that they have with the consumer offerings from Google. And the big issue with Google's consumer offerings is that they seem to have limited to no support and that there is a very real chance that Google will just shut them down all of a sudden. This is the exact opposite of what you want in the enterprise space, where Service & Stability are paramount. Even though I know that Google's corporate offerings are treated differently, that little niggling doubt remains. Plus, Google really needs to hire some damn marketing experts to sell the features & benefits of their offerings and make them cohesive - they just have their stuff plastered everywhere.

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> And the big issue with Google's consumer offerings is that they seem to have limited to no support and that there is a very real chance that Google will just shut them down all of a sudden.

Express has, IME, excellent support, and I haven't seen any Google product (consumer or otherwise) shutdown "all of a sudden".

The ones people point to as examples of Google products being shut down were shut down with very long notice.

I do think that there is a very loud group of people who like to raise the "Google's just gonna shut it down tomorrow" line every time a Google service is mentioned, but it doesn't seem to be based on any real history of Google being any more prone than any other provider to shut down services (consumer or otherwise) on short notice or without a migration path. Maybe that loud group represents a real and commercially-significant feeling about Google in the market and not just a small, loud group that doesn't real effect the market for Google products. But I don't know what you can really do with that, even if it does.

This is also my impression of Google compute offerings, but it's also my impression of AWS offerings.

I mean, when people think of AWS services, do "service and stability" really come to mind? IME it's impossible to reach a person unless you're a multi-million-dollar org, and Amazon itself tells customers that AWS services can go down at any time and it's up to the customer to architect the application to deal with it.

If I had to peg a reason AWS gets treated differently in the marketplace, I think it's probably some combination of a) AWS was first to market, and b) AWS revenue seems materially important to Amazon, while Google Compute revenue is a rounding error to Alphabet. Therefore, Amazon has a lot more incentive to keep, maintain, and grow AWS.

> IME it's impossible to reach a person unless you're a multi-million-dollar org

I am sorry to hear that, but I can assure you it's not the case. I'm an engineer on a newer (and therefore smaller) AWS service, and I help investigate customer complaints, from customers of all sizes, all the time. I'll also note that not only do we handle cases that come in via our paid support, we also do deep dives for customers who post to our service's forums and indicate issues.

My experience with AWS has been exactly this. I had a Cognito question/issue on IOS that I posted to stack-overflow and got a quick response from an engineer at Amazon. Also I posted a support ticket (zero paid support) to increase my sns API calls limit (which didn't end up being required because I was doing it wrong) and they got back to me over a few days to a week.

On the other hand, Google takes my Android app off the play store with next to zero details on the reason why and I have next to zero methods to contact them. The only way I was able to get my app back was to remove features via trial and error to determine what part was infringing. Why would i partner with Google again for hosting?

You are comparing 2 very different products. Now if you were comparing play store support to Apple App Store support they would be more in line with each other. Or Googles cloud offerings to AWS.

Play is a low margin business per "customer" compared to cloud. This has direct impact on the type of support you can expect.

They have reasonably priced support plans that give you access to a person: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/

I can't comment on Google, but we pay for AWS business support ($100 per month currently) and we can raise as many support tickets as we like and get nearly instant access to an engineer. Also, the quality of the support has been amazing. They have often gone out of their way to solve problems that are not strictly AWS problems (e.g. MySQL tuning, network issues, VPN questions, etc) without ever questioning it. Our account manager is easy to reach and through him I can get access to solution architects who are happy to advise on pretty much anything. There are also frequent invitations to AWS events, where SAs and account managers are usually keen to meet up and discuss projects. I know this is enlightened self-interest on their part rather than altruism, but it's definitely to our mutual benefit. When pushing to trial AWS I often encountered this view within my org (that is was large, faceless, and inhuman with poor support) but the experience we've had has dispelled that myth.

That's pretty much exactly what my perception is. Add to that, you're account gets shut down and/or frozen without warning and only a kafka-esque system to find out why you were shut down.

It makes sense that isn't true but I have to admit it is what comes to mind.

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