Of all the posts like this I’ve seen the customers are always 1) extremely scant on details about what they were using GCP for or why they were suspended, and more importantly 2) never actually paying for support.
Having worked with a fair few academics, I’m guessing they lost track of their service account keys and the account got suspended for crypto mining.
There have been plenty of posts where the reason was apparent. One i recall was caused by a guy having malware on his phone, and he happened to use a work email on his phone, so the entire GWS organization was banned, shutting down the company's operations.
In my last company, we _did_ pay for Google Cloud support and when BigQuery jobs started to fail randomly, causing huge trouble producing critical reports, the response was essentially "we are investigating", "we have identified the issue", and "please wait for it to be fixed". Hardly what I would call support. They couldn't care less.
Shitting on GCP is just popular on HN and always gets upvoted. AWS and Azure have royally fucked thousands of customers if you care to search for those writeups. My wild ass guess, considering posts like these have zero background details, is that they were careless with service account keys and their account got suspended for mining crypto or something. They also probably weren’t actually paying for support of any kind and that’s why no one is responding to them.
Can't say for GCP and Azure. But I run two small projects on AWS, with monthly billings of $8k and $150 respectively. I have always received very good support to any requests that I have made on both projects.
Nope. We had been testing in our development and staging environments for months. We were deploying to production the exact same stack and we got our quota revoked within about an hour. We must have tripped some random thing. We have absolutely no idea what I could have been though.
Quota for what? In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.
The quota we needed increased far beyond the usual was the YouTube API. The startup was a media editing and publishing tool, with a feature to upload videos to YouTube on your behalf. Uploading a video requires a ton of quota, which they gave us.
Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.
How many services have meaningful SLAs for extreme downtime?
Github and (parts of) AWS will give you a small discount at 0.1% downtime, a bigger discount at 1% downtime, and AWS will refund the whole month for 5% downtime. But beyond that they don't care. If a particular customer gets no service at all then their entire $0 gets refunded and that's it.
If you werent willing to pay for an SLA, and they clearly werent going to offer one to you… why is it surprising if literally no promises were made in writing?
Why would they intentionally lose money on your private commercial activity without even that?
I'm calling out your "questions" as containing a bunch of unsupported claims about the situation on top of weird assumptions about how things have to work. It was not an answer, and your questions as written don't deserve answers.
It's not an opinion-based claim. Maybe I missed something that would make me incorrect, but whether you made up details that make OP look bad is a factual matter. It's true or it isn't.
Also I said nothing about my opinion "outweighing" anyone else. Where did you get that from?
> hide behind some weird pretense
I'm sorry if it came off that way. I wasn't going for any weird pretense, and don't think most people would read the comment that way.
I could disagree but it doesn't matter. I said a particular thing was not an opinion. You pointing at something else I said and calling it an opinion doesn't affect my claims at all.
What matters is my claim that you made up stuff about _drg9's situation. That claim is objectively true or false, not an opinion. And the evidence I see all says the claim is true.
> Take your nonsense elsewhere, it’s totally derailling the thread.
Derailing what? Nobody else has posted in this part of the comments in days.
> In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.
Well 0 is not sensible, and who cares if it's weird if they got detailed approval and they're paying for it.
Sure, but the comment is so vague I’m skeptical the OP knew what they were doing in the first place, or it happened exactly as they wrote. Maybe a service quota was reset to the default? But just set to zero? Doesn’t pass the sniff test.
"... and they're paying for it..." - that might be the exact issue. Google has no way to ensure that these small shops and startups will pay their bill, so quotas are used to prevent the company from running up a large bill they won't be able to pay.
I see a bunch of threads on reddit about startups accidentally going way over budget and then asking for credits back.
This doesn't at all mean the startups have bad intent, but things happen and Google doesn't want to deal with a huge collection issue.
If someone rolled up to your gas station and wanted to pump 10,000 gallons of gas but only pay you next month - would you allow it?
Well that is kind of a problem of their own making. The clouds refuse to entertain the prospect of pre-paying for services/having some sort of hard spending limits because they know that over-allocation is probably driving a decent amount of revenue.
That’s not how quotas work in GCP. Google sets quotas for certain APIs for interacting with GCP itself, like how many VMs you can create per second. They’re not billable. Sometimes these quotas can be be increased if you need them to be. But the way op described it makes no sense.
They denied my request for a service account quota increase even though my use case[1] was literally straight from their documentation. They only increased it after I complained on Twitter and got retweeted by Corey Quinn.
Every time I’ve pushed for cloud run at jobs that were on or leaning towards k8s I was looked at as a very unserious person. Like you can’t be a “real” engineer if you’re not battling yaml configs and argoCD all day (and all night).
It does have real tradeoffs/flaws/limitations, chief among them, Run isn't allowed to "become" Kubernetes, you're expected to "graduate". There's been an immense marketing push for Kubernetes and Platform Engineering and all the associated SAAS sending the same message (also, notice how much less praise you hear about it now that the marketing has died down?).
The incentives are just really messed up all around. Think about all the actual people working in devops who have their careers/job tied to Kubernetes, and how many developers get drawn in by the allure and marketing because it lets them work on more fun problems than their actual job, and all the provisioned instances and vendor software and certs and conferences, and all the money that represents.
Well, no. It just means no single player can dominate the field in terms of profits. Anthropic is probably still losing money on subscribers, so other companies "reselling" their offering does them no good. Forcing you to use their TUI at least gives them control of how you interact with the models back. I'm guessing but since they've gone full send into the developer tooling space, their pitch to investors likely highlights the # of users on CC, not their subscriber numbers (which again, lose money). The move makes since in that respect.
Well, yes. When competition is "pure and perfect" then profits eventually tend to be zero. That's a law of economics that is always true regardless of the industry.
I'll have claude code editing a script on my laptop and another on the VM running it and synthesizing the results. Then sometimes I'll have another doing some odd job or researching something. Then I'll pull up gemini in my browser to figure out what I should make for lunch...
Same site as the OP has an article stating Tesla makes it difficult, and if you put 50k in 8 years ago and obtain 50k now, I think you lost a lot of money. I have no opinion on the process itself though, I don’t know enough about Tesla as I’m only interested in the engineering, just wanted to point out the inflation losses.
FWIW firebase auth and firebase DB are two separate things, and you can use them completely separately. However "Firebase" is a PaaS so I see how it gets confusing.
Fair call out but if I am a firebase customer, as I have been in the past but less frequently so, I treat them as a singular entity. In other words, there’s no situation I would use firebase and not use its auth, because the reason I might use firebase is Because Of the auth, not In Spite Of. There’s no world for me where firebase is the preferred option that doesn’t use auth, the integration like that is literally the only reason I would ever consider ClosedSourceOwnedByGoogle over alternatives
Having worked with a fair few academics, I’m guessing they lost track of their service account keys and the account got suspended for crypto mining.
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