Slashdot Mirror
'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 came here to say essentially the same thing. Three letters come to mind: S....L....A....
If you do not have an agreement with the provider that indicates the measures they will take to restore service in the event of an outage, and the escalating penalties on the provider if they fail to restore service according to the agreement, then you really have no business running a revenue-generating production service with that provider. Or, you don't have a business at all, just a hobby.
If an extended system outage can cause "millions of dollars in lost revenue" then you should have a DR plan. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Have copies of everything at another site (EC2, Azure, Colo, etc) that you can turn on and switch to in this event. If millions of dollars are on the line, then it shouldn't be unreasonable to have such a plan and infrastructure established.
That is the opposite of the story. The story says Google took every server down.
Why is it "getting harder" to host your own solutions?
Many applications are not even available for purchase of a copy to run on your server. Instead, they are available exclusively on service as a software substitute (SaaSS) terms, namely that the application runs on an application service provider's server. One example of these is the server for any major MMO game.
As a consultant a typical war I get into with customers is to pick the cloud setup email, drive etc... I always recommend Microsoft instead of Google products, and I have to always remind people that, altough the strong brand name, Google is an advertising company not an Enterprise partner, and I have countless stories of google pulling the plug on services because of "reasons" whatever, also, they have no respect for the customer when they drop a product, they just send an email with a month notice, and that is a good one, and then they pull the plug, never ever use google products for enterprise, ever. True story!
A simpler and more likely explanation is that you paid $0 for the service and got your money's worth.
There are also lots of obvious examples that disprove your conspiracy theory. If it was politically motivated then what kind of politics wants to silence both the far right and progressives and non-political trans make-up videos and help the copyright industry abuse people?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I can understand summarily shutting down a customer on a residential Internet connection, or a small business shared web hosting provider. However when providing an "enterprise grade" service, you should be prepared to give your customers the benefit of the doubt. About the only instances I can think of for an enterprise service to shut down a customer is if they are greatly exceeding their allocated resources and/or the activity associated with the customer is actively in the process of harming other customers.
Cheapfuck customer was running enterprise-level applications on what was supposed to be a consumer-level account. That's why Google Bots detected "suspicious" actitivy and shut them down. If they hadn't tried to be cheapfucks and were using an enterprise account this most likely wouldn't have happened.
Google's cloud services are enterprise grade if you pay enterprise prices for them.
If you pay for it on a credit card assigned to the CFO then you are not an enterprise and you are not paying enterprise prices.
They chose a cheap, no-SLA no-support service, probably because it was cheap. Then they get upset that they aren't receiving the support they didn't pay for.
Exactly this. I don't use Google Cloud, but my 'enterprise' AWS service comes with a dedicated account manager and architect who I can call at anytime for help.
Sounds like this guy cheaped out then is bitching because he received cheap service.
Spoken like someone who has never had to fix a server immediately :-)
One of the strong points of cloud computing is the infrastructure to shift load to accommodate failing hardware. To reproduce that capability with your own hardware & infrastructure requires a tremendous amount of planning and capital investment: in power, servers, and network. It's almost never a simple matter of "fix the server immediately".
Because I know someone's going to insist this is not the case and ask how you know differently, I'll step in and say it now: credit card verification.
In the rare cases where enterprise services are paid for with a credit card, any and all verification for the $10k+/mo in charges is done when the contract is signed in person.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I had a $2million/18 month defense contract paid by credit card via a random accounting person 2000 miles away. I would say you are not quite up with the times... $10k/month can be peanuts.
Whoosh. The GP's point was the Google never contractually obligates itself to customers, because it can get away with that, flouting the norms of commerce. They can get away with this because their customers are stupid.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
This sounds like asking fro trouble to me!