We are GCP customers for the last couple of years. We use other cloud platforms(AWS, IBM, Oracle, OrionVM) too. We don't use GKE but use rancher/kubernetes combo on their standard platform.
So far GCP is the best, hands down in terms of stability. We never had a single outage or maintenance downtime notification till now. We are power users but our monitoring didn't pick any anomaly so i don't think this issue had rampant impact on other services.
But i find it concerning that they provided very little update on what went wrong. I also think its better to expect nil support out of any big cloud provider if you don't have paid support. Funny how all these big cloud providers think you are not eligible for support de-facto. Sigh.
I use AWS free tier and get customer support through email, but thats not the case with GCP. Do they provide free email support?
If you are an early stage startup can you afford their 200/Month support, when your entire GCP bill is under $1. However, that doesn't mean you don't have to support them.
You know there's 1-man "start ups"/companies out there that serve more users than 99.5% of VC startups ever will, which earn their owner a very livable wage, but who still can't afford a 500 bucks business support plan on all of the 20 services they use.
If you've got VC money to blow so you can pretend your SaaS toy can feed 500 people while having money left to throw at things, that's cool. Just remember that other people might be running sustainable businesses.
There are literally millions of small 1-2 people business that make less than 10k in profits.
I mean sure, they could go and probably afford to waste $200 extra on something random that will be useless to them most of the time, but that money is going straight out of their paycheck.
You don't remain profitable though by repeatedly making bad decisions like that. Which was my point.
Running a (small) profitable business is about making the right decisions consistently, and if you're likely to waste money on one thing, you're also likely to waste it on the 19 other similar things.
Maybe speak to literally anyone you know who is running a small businesses if you want to know more. Yes that includes your local small stores on your street.
At the end of the day you probably pissed off quite a few people on here when you called their livelihood a hobby project.
The scenario being discussed was building a company on top of GCP and being unable to afford $200/month for support costs. Tell me what “mom and pop” shops are pulling in $10k/month from GCP-based software but are unwilling/unable to pay $200/month for the very thing that underpins their livelihoods?
This is akin to saying that a mom and pop laundromat can’t afford insurance, or shouldn’t because they won’t frequently need it.
You’re trying to equate small businesses with hobbies. You’ve now resorted to straw men, slippery slopes, and false equivalency. Maybe consider that if you have to distort the situation this much to make your point, you might just be wrong.
> At the end of the day you probably pissed off quite a few people on here when you called their livelihood a hobby project.
I didn’t say anything about anyone’s livelihood. You’re the one pretending that small businesses bringing home $120k/year can’t afford a $200 monthly support bill.
I bet the guy who started this thread about GCP’s support cost has made a sum total of <$1000 from his “startup”. Likely <$10. Hobby.
I don’t care if “quite a few people” got pissed about my comment. People with egos that delicate shouldn’t use social media.
> The scenario being discussed was building a company on top of GCP and being unable to afford $200/month for support costs. Tell me what “mom and pop” shops are pulling in $10k/month from GCP-based software but are unwilling/unable to pay $200/month for the very thing that underpins their livelihoods?
I was trying to tell you that most small businesses can't go around spending hundreds of bucks of things that provide little value, whether that's a business support plans on services they use or something else. It's true regardless of whether you're a brick and mortar store or some online service.
> This is akin to saying that a mom and pop laundromat can’t afford insurance, or shouldn’t because they won’t frequently need it.
Speaking about about false equivalencies...
> You’re the one pretending that small businesses bringing home $120k/year can’t afford a $200 monthly support bill.
First off, I spoke of businesses making generally less than that.
Also (I already said this, good job ignoring that!) paying $200 bucks on a single useless thing is survivable for even a small business - but you know what's better than only making one bad business decision? Making no bad ones at all. Making too many will quickly break the camel's back.
Which was my whole argument and it's also what people generally refer to when they say they can't afford something.
For instance you may say "I can't afford to go to this restaurant", even though you'd have enough money to do it without going immediately bankrupt. But it'd be a bad decision, too many of which quickly add up.
> I was trying to tell you that most small businesses can't go around spending hundreds of bucks of things that provide little value
And I'm telling you that if you built your business on top of GCP, a support contract is probably not "low value". You'd happily pay $200 for support on your critical infrastructure, just as you'd happily pay $200 for a repairman to fix your washing machine if you owned a laundromat.
If you don't need support, then sure, don't pay for the plan. If you do need support, $200 seems pretty reasonable.
> Speaking about about false equivalencies...
Signing up for a monthly recurring support plan in case you need it is literally insuring your business.
> For instance you may say "I can't afford to go to this restaurant", even though you'd have enough money to do it without going immediately bankrupt. But it'd be a bad decision, too many of which quickly add up.
A support plan for your critical infrastructure probably isn't "useless". Which is the point. If your need for support is that low, then either you've built your own redundant systems to protect you or more likely you aren't running a real business.
No, I understand that most hobby projects are just hobbies and Google/Amazon/etc are under no obligation to provide support for hobbies that are literally a net cost to them.
I'm glad AWS's free tier is working for you, but complaining that Google doesn't want to give you free capacity for your business and then also provide you free support for that business is pretty absurd.
I don't understand why someone would choose to deploy anything mission critical without having an support contract with the ISP, the manufacturer of the the software etc.
Simple, the cost of an outage is less than the cost of a support contract. Very few things are really mission critical as in they can never go down. Rather they simply have a cost to going down and you can choose to pay that one way or another.
I transitioned from collocation to self managed remote server farm and then onto self managed remote vms. All these providers provided de-facto support whether we opted for one or not. You can go to their portal and raise a ticket.
I am not saying with vast numbers its feasible but big cloud providers don't even give you the opportunity to raise a ticket if its their fault. There is a price you pay extra when you opt for any one of them but many don't realize. Having said that - almost all the time, our skilled expertise is better than their initial two level of support staff. We realized it early so we handle it better by going over the documentation and making our code resilient since all cloud platforms have some limit or another since overselling in a region is something they can't avoid. Going multiple regions across when you handle these exceptions is the only way through.
So far GCP is the best, hands down in terms of stability. We never had a single outage or maintenance downtime notification till now. We are power users but our monitoring didn't pick any anomaly so i don't think this issue had rampant impact on other services.
But i find it concerning that they provided very little update on what went wrong. I also think its better to expect nil support out of any big cloud provider if you don't have paid support. Funny how all these big cloud providers think you are not eligible for support de-facto. Sigh.