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Comment by mrtrustor | Hacker News Reader

When a company like Deutsche Bank [1] signs a 10-year deal, you can be sure that they have been convinced that the products they rely on will not go anywhere.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/google-de...

(Google Cloud employee here)

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I don't work in cloud, I work in a completely different part of Tech. However, we do deal with big clients, and essentially it was always a different game for them- extended support for products, alpha/patch releases where necessary, because those businesses drive so much revenue and the last thing you want is for the corporation at an organisational level say "We're a <vendor> client".

That doesn't help the smaller developers though - you just have to hope that Deutsche Bank wants the same things you do, which is.... unlikely.

I think that would be one of the benefits of being Google (or Amazon, or MS) -- their cloud strategy isn't as beholden to a single customer.

Which means they may or may not do a good job of feature prioritization, but it's not always "whatever (big customer) wants."

FWIW, when I worked for a larger GCP customer, they seemed fairly decent at hearing about and addressing concerns. I realize cloud functionality (especially interfaces) is accreted over the years, and can't be delivered all at once.

Comment like this makes me wonder if you ever worked in enterprise before. Plenty of services/products have been cancelled/mothballed on large enterprise contracts once the services/products are no longer profitable, the services/products generally get sunsetted.

What if you aren’t Deutsche Bank? Parts of the products they depend on are mostly safe, what about features they don’t use, but my small shop depends on?

Shh... The product marketing-authored deck on common objections doesn't care about SMBs. No offense to the original comment, but that's such a rehearsed answer that as you mentioned is irrelevant (despite sounding good on the surface) to everyone else.

A contract like Deutsche Bank means dedicated GCP customer engineers, professional service engagements at the highest levels, direct conversations with individual product leaders/managers, roadmaps conveyed to their needs, alphas etc etc.

If it's irrelevant to the Deutsche Bank's of customers, then it's of course fair game to get f'd with.

> you can be sure that they have been convinced that the products they rely on will not go anywhere.

And the products won't go anywhere.. for Deutsche Bank. This is common for enterprise contracts. It means jack shit for consumers.

That actually doesn't mean anything to me when I personally have had to deal with the shut off of many, many Google products and your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way.

> your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way.

Is that really true? I don't have a lot of experience with Firebase, just notifications and analytics, but working with Cognito and Amplify one- two years ago was like a bad joke, more similar to a fledgling startup than a well-rounded offering.

It rather seems to me that a lot of organisations are moving to GCP; BigQuery and its integrations with other Google products seems like a killer app, and GKE is seen as the better choice for hosted Kubernetes.

I'm still a fan of Red Hat's OpenShift, but I'm actually surprised how well Google seems to be managing their {S,P,I}aaS offerings and strategy in this space.

I had GCP kill my servers without warning because they claimed someone was mining crypto on them (they weren't). That alone was the permanent end to my business relationship with Google.

I should have known better though. Like I said, I've been through a lot of Google shutdowns and various screw jobs (remember the Google App Engine price hike?).

AWS is a professional product. It has warts but it's much more solid than GCP, technically and from a business perspective.

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