Comment by mikeyr0x | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeyr0x | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

That is correct. CC billing and individual projects could be consumer level usage. Anyone can signup for this level account and use for whatever purpose. Offline invoicing and G Suite / Organization setup / domain validation / enterprise support could be thought of as enterprise and would come with assurances such as billing payment stability.

What are you talking about? Are you representing Google in some way?

We have significant spend on CC with GCP and we’re not “consumers”. Our account manager has no issue with this. If they did we’d move somewhere else.

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.

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).

They actually relented on that. You can now register "Individual" accounts that don't need a tax ID: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/resources/vat-overview

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.

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