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Posted by agwa 2 days ago

Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time(www.agwa.name)
410 points | 191 commentspage 5
LightBug1 1 day ago|
I'll tell you the problem with Google (in my experience). They've moved to Big Company cash cow mode. They even use SAP Ariba ... which dictates that their teams are silo'd and ultra rigid ... and so dealing with them is a nightmare.

N=1

exabrial 1 day ago||
Once again: Do not use Google for anything important. "An ant has no quarrel with a boot."
matt-p 1 day ago||
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice..
6510 2 days ago||
> Clearly, I cannot rely on having a Google account for production use cases. Google has built a complex, unreliable system

You cant use anything from Google. I only use gmail, my mail account only got banned one time for a week. For years I thought the punishment for using gmail was just a mater of time. I tried to imagine what weird things could trigger it. Maybe they will one day just end the service because it isn't profitable enough?

I decided the most likely would be that the mail account gets banned as a punishment for using any of their other services.

Then I made the "mistake" to switch from iphone to android. It almost immediately started complaining that my mailbox was full. The new reality is that each and every button I press on the phone could potentially end my mailbox.

Now that they [also] have very sophisticated LLM's the crappy customer service seems intentional.

tjpnz 2 days ago||
GCP is a terrible idea for anything important unless you're big enough to have an executive team and yours knows theirs - was the quote I heard somewhere but am struggling to attribute.
calvinmorrison 2 days ago||
fool me once

fool me twice

fool me thrice

LollipopYakuza 2 days ago|
They explain in the article why they still have to have a Google Cloud account. I am sure that they would gladly not deal with Google at all if they could...
formerly_proven 2 days ago||
[flagged]
zaoui_amine 2 days ago||
[flagged]
LollipopYakuza 2 days ago|
Unfortunately, one doesn't get to chose who their customers make business with.
znpy 2 days ago||
Maybe it’s time to ditch google cloud?

After the third occurrence of this i’d blame this on you, honestly.

fiskfiskfisk 2 days ago||
As noted in the article it's hard to ditch Google Cloud when the reason you keep the account is for integration with, well, Google Cloud.

I'm sure they'd be happy to not have rely on having a Google Cloud account for integration with Google Cloud if possible.

agwa 2 days ago|||
Right, and we will be ditching our Google Cloud account this time, but as explained in the post this will come at either a security or a usability cost for our customers, which is why I did not ditch after the first suspension.
anonym29 2 days ago|||
Those are negligible compared to a 100% availability / uptime cost to your business incurred from being a serf to a feudal tyrant with no name or face that enjoys abusing you.

Using GCP, AWS, or Azure is like volunteering to use your own money to rent heavy construction equipment to construct your own jail cell and excavate your own grave.

But hey, at least you get to avoid the capex on the heavy construction equipment, and it's always¹ available!

¹ except for when human error takes it offline for 14 hours straight

TheOtherHobbes 2 days ago||
You're not just dealing with a massive bureaucracy, you're dealing with a massive automated bureaucracy whose rules aren't explicit, whose algorithms are buggy, and which can destroy your business on a whim with no recourse, without even noticing.
znpy 1 day ago|||
I can understand you not ditching after the first suspension but the second suspension should have been the point where you took the choice.

First time is a fluke, second time is a serious wake-up call, third time it's your fault.

Do you really want to reach the point where all your customers have an outage, you have to rush implementing something else (oidc or api keys) AND rush your customers to change your settings?

kassner 1 day ago||
Second and third suspensions are a week apart. Wouldn’t be enough time to shift customers to a new auth format, specially when most of the burden is on them.
october8140 2 days ago|||
At some point it’s not worth supporting google cloud.
rcruzeiro 2 days ago|||
Have you bothered reading the post where the author stated why they cannot simply ditch GCP?
znpy 1 day ago||
yes.

If you had actually read the post you would have understood there are ways to ditch GCP, but they are perceived as cumbersome.

The exaple is OpenID Connect. It works well with Azure (according to the post).

I'm sorry to say this, but the author is choosing something easy but unrealiable over something a bit more complicated but reliable.

It's really the author's fault. They are choosing their comfort over the service reliability (and keeping promises made to customers).

Heck they might even go with api keys. They could give explicit direction on the minimal amount of permissions the api key would need and they could ping the users each 3-4 months to rotate them.

But no, I guess we'll have another post at some point about the fourth (definitive?) account suspension.

x0x0 1 day ago||
> The exaple is OpenID Connect. It works well with Azure

That's nonsense. It requires a 7 step setup process that customers will mess up.

philipwhiuk 2 days ago||
I think his problem with this is that his customers use Google Cloud.
didip 2 days ago|
If you are a business, I am not sure why on earth do you want to deal with the world’s worst customer service company: Google.

They got used to ads money, where they control the entire board. They never got good in other types of businesses. Especially not in customer service.

teddyh 2 days ago|
> If you are a business, I am not sure why on earth do you want to deal with the world’s worst customer service company: Google.

The answer is extremely simple. People aren’t businesses. You are right, no business should choose Google. But people do, for their own reasons. And businesses can only act through people. And people have their own priorities which override the interest of the business, like “What should I choose to never be blamed if/when it fails?” Google is an extremely safe bet there, like IBM of old.