Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

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Not only that but they actually provide real support.

I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day.

In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools so I was unable to use the domain with GCP Cloud Run. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the product manager reached out to lecture me about how I shouldn't be using Cloud Run with domain mapping because that's in "preview". He then pointed me to another method to point a domain at cloud run, which it turned out was also in preview. All of this was because Google Webmaster Tools validated the domain but GCP wasn't able to get that information. I ended up cancelling the GCP project and just using AWS (as I should have from the start).

It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.

There was that time in 2013, that I leaked my AWS key and a "hacker" ran up a $3500 bill running Litecoin mining[0]. Not only was the support excellent and forgave the debt, Werner Vogel (AWS CTO) popped into the HN thread[1] and offered to help -- I got to email him and tell him his people were already on top of it.

And yes, they have made their money back off me in the 10 years since (average $100-200 a month).

[0]: https://vertis.io/2013/12/16/unauthorised-litecoin-mining/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908

Exact same thing happened to me but the bill was $11000.

Ouch, yeah it became really common, and I know of ex-colleagues that had the same problem.

Would you mind sharing how (in broad terms) your key got leaked? I'm always interested in stories like that as a point of comparison to my own (not great) security practices just so I know how reasonable I'm being.

It was a GitHub repo that I made public that I didn't realise had a key in it.

And yes,it's bad practice putting the keys in code to begin with, and I knew better.

Happens to the best of us Thanks for being willing to share, openness about "stupid" mistakes helps everyone else avoid them.

Biggest lesson is to setup billing alerts for any service like that. Put it 20% above normal usage and then you'll get a fairly immediate warning.

Won't save some of it if you're sleeping, but can definitely reduce the time someone has to run up bills.

>It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.

Also to the users of their open source software, as many people who used Tensorflow 1.x can attest to.

It's not support if you have to complain on a public forum though.

That was due to my own whining and impatience. Going through the normal support channels tends to be pretty solid through.

I will say though that companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.

> companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.

Very much this. At my company we have many other means of support readily available, but some people instinctively reach for Twitter for peer support. Being active on Twitter means our support team can help even those people who don't think to use our official channels, which is good for the customer and good for our image.

Twitter probably isn't official but some companies have official social media support channels. Azure has an issues-only GitHub repo for Kubernetes (AKS) and you generally get a project team member instead of fighting through layers of support.

You don't need to, there are proper support channels.

I think that parent post was just implying that AWS cares about it's image and will provide support even if you don't go down the correct channels.

Google doesn't give a shit regardless of the method of request.

They do have support channels depending on your account type. I've used the enterprise support and they respond well.

They even go into your cloud architecture and tell you where you fucked up.

> It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.

This feels like the crux of the difference between Google and Microsoft/Amazon.

Google product culture seems to assume they built everything correctly, so if there's an issue, you're questioning their competency.

Microsoft/Amazon product culture seems to start with "weird things will constantly go wrong", so support is viewed as an opportunity to figure out how things can be made better, based on real world experience.

For most Google products, what seems to be missing is a link between customer support and SRE. I.e. "We're Google, we can't do customer support at our scale. SRE is a superior way of keeping services reliable."

Fair... but SRE doesn't handle "the real world is messy, and here's a situation a product manager never thought of."

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