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'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud' (medium.com)
A user on Medium named "Punch a Server" says you should not use Google Cloud due to the "'no-warnings-given, abrupt way' they pull the plug on your entire system if they (or the machines) believe something is wrong." The user has a project running in production on Google Cloud (GCP) that is used to monitor hundreds of wind turbines and scores of solar plants scattered across 8 countries. When their project goes down, money is lost. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares the report: Early today morning (June 28, 2018) I receive an alert from Uptime Robot telling me my entire site is down. I receive a barrage of emails from Google saying there is some "potential suspicious activity" and all my systems have been turned off. EVERYTHING IS OFF. THE MACHINE HAS PULLED THE PLUG WITH NO WARNING. The site is down, app engine, databases are unreachable, multiple Firebases say I've been downgraded and therefore exceeded limits.
Customer service chat is off. There's no phone to call. I have an email asking me to fill in a form and upload a picture of the credit card and a government issued photo id of the card holder. Great, let's wake up the CFO who happens to be the card holder. What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything -- years of work -- millions of dollars in lost revenue. I fill in the form with the details and thankfully within 20 minutes all the services started coming alive. The first time this happened, we were down for a few hours. In all we lost everything for about an hour. An automated email arrives apologizing for "inconvenience" caused. Unfortunately The Machine has no understanding of the "quantum of inconvenience" caused.
Customer service chat is off. There's no phone to call. I have an email asking me to fill in a form and upload a picture of the credit card and a government issued photo id of the card holder. Great, let's wake up the CFO who happens to be the card holder. What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything -- years of work -- millions of dollars in lost revenue. I fill in the form with the details and thankfully within 20 minutes all the services started coming alive. The first time this happened, we were down for a few hours. In all we lost everything for about an hour. An automated email arrives apologizing for "inconvenience" caused. Unfortunately The Machine has no understanding of the "quantum of inconvenience" caused.
I have (neigh, had) a client making the same choice right now.
+1 for having the horse sense to move on from that client, after you told them to hold their horses and they didn't listen. I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. If they're going to get on their high horse and be as stubborn as a mule, then they're going to end up trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. When comparing in-house vs cloud, in-house really is a horse of a different colour. Trying to run a tech business on the cloud is just horsing around.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
Let's rein in the puns, ok? Feels like we're flogging a dead horse.