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Comment by thedevelopnik | Hacker News Reader

I love Google’s Cloud services. I think in many ways they have the best product.

I also worked somewhere where we made a million dollar commit. We had to get support through a VAR because Google basically doesn’t offer support. We basically paid someone else to file tickets that got dismissive responses while we had prod meltdown.

They’re also price competitive. I was going to go there again in my current position in a very small org. We have GSuite and to get GCloud working we had to turn on Cloud Identity. We didn’t see the free tier in GSuite, so I went to ask GSuite support. The only accessible support was a bot. When I asked the bot how to talk to a human, it helpfully referred me to a bunch of forum posts of people complaining you can’t talk to a human at Google.

We’re now with Azure.

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In what ways is Google the best product if you had a prod meltdown and couldn't get support, and when you wanted to increase your use of GCS at another job, you were unable to do so?

> In what ways is Google the best product

> I think in many ways they have the best product.

They didn't say that Google had the best product. They said that in many categories, it was the best. That doesn't mean it's the overall best product. In fact, from their post it seems pretty clear that they ended up deciding that Google Cloud wasn't the overall best product.

> if you had a prod meltdown and couldn't get support

Presumably, they were implying that customer support _wasn't_ one of those many ways.

I think they were just asking them to justify in what ways do they think Google have the best product as their post only really highlighted the ways they weren't.

Given the experience they had in the ways they were bad, it could be difficult for others to justify them despite the ways in which they might have the best product.

I read it as completely steeped in sarcasm

Yeah fair question.

I love their GUI, the way projects are organized and RBAC is handled across them. Creating custom cpu/mem ratio machines.

Little things like VMs in a kubernetes cluster being viewable as VMs (they’re obscured in Azure I’ve learned).

Pricing!

Like, there are very few ways they’re not my favorite cloud provider. Which speaks to how unspeakably horrible their support is that at my current org I am not going with them.

Because at the end of the day, a pretty good infrastructure product that you can get support for wins every time over an excellent one that when it breaks is catastrophic and nobody listens.

I’m spending this week rebuilding all my Azure infra because I learned about 10 different ways they hide ridiculous price increases in what you build and my infra costs twice what I thought it would. But I literally can’t get ahold of someone at Google to help me become a customer.

Meanwhile I’m not even paying for support at Azure yet and when I sent an email about the pricing I got a response from a human who checked up on my satisfaction, and then from her boss, who was checking on my satisfaction with the first email.

How long ago was this? On my ‘basic’ workspace plan the help button asks you to describe your issue, but then it’s one click away from getting phone support.

Hey, now. At least you don't have to dismiss the chromebook notification from the old support portal...

The phone and chat buttons never show up for me. We’re on a non-profit plan so maybe that’s why.

I'm looking for a managed Knative solution and Google Cloud Run looks like a great product. The only reason I'm not using it is because I also had first hand experience with Google's atrocious customer service in the past.

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