Relying on Google Cloud
Punch a Server (via Hacker News):
Early today morning (28 June 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.
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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.
Bartłomiej Owczarek and Tomasz Nawrocki (via Hacker News):
Google decided to make Maps its next billion dollar business by raising prices 14 times and decreasing free usage limit almost 30 times, all with minimal notice period.
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Map providers use different pricing models, which makes direct comparison of prices difficult. Here is an overview of the options for paid usage (not taking into account free usage allowance)[…]
Google Cloud Platform is particularly interesting to me because it’s a paid product: no divided loyalties between advertisers and users, when helping one audience can hurt the other. Paying customers means Google’s incentives are nicely aligned: make the product better.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
With Google the problem is conflict of interest between its Cloud and consumer facing properties. Enjoy your Google API... until you make to good a use of it to serve the same consumers that Google wants to serve. Then Google will raise prices 30 times with 1 month notice and tell you that they simplified them for you (like in Google Maps case study quoted above)
Relying on … your own infrastructure? Let's be honest: It can go offline anytime. Yep, you can try to bring it online again, however, your dependent on your IT staff, or, if you are small company, on external IT support. You need Plan B in any case.
On the other hand, it is really an issue that Google etc. have no legal obligation to respond to requests of all kind including customer requests and legal requests. Another issue is that agreements with Google etc. are really one-sided while it is difficult to argue with consumer protection since mostly small companies are affected …