I went through a ton of hoops to get approval for our quota. We sent them system diagrams, code samples, financial reports, growth predictions, etc. It was months of back and forth. I'll also add that it was very annoying because they auto-reject your quota request if you don't respond to their emails within 48 hours but their responses take 1-3 weeks. In any case, after 6 months, they eventually approved us for our quota, we launched, and they shut us down to 0 quota across all services the instant our production app got traffic.
We contacted them again asking for help. We never got any human response. We got a boiler plate template a few times, but that was it.
I will never ever ever again use a cloud service where I can't guarantee that I can get good customer service. Unfortunately for a small business that means no big clouds like AWS, GCP, etc.
Yes, I am bitter.
In the 2010s I always got an AWS support team to help.
Now I get handed off to an external partner of AWS certified contractors.
They are often terrible. They have no backend systems access and just run through the AWS equivalent of "reboot it", "defrag your disk". Basically trying to find an issue in my pipeline. Which they never do because it's the same TF scripts used for years.
Only once we waste time going through the motions do I get passed up to someone who can actually correct the backend issue in the AWS stack itself.
Tbf though I rarely ever have to contact AWS support at this point. The few times I have in the last 2-3 was due to issues after they rolled out an update or with a newer service we wanted to use.
Never have issues with stable services like S3, ECS, EKS, or RDS.
To be fair I would bet money that the overwhelmingly vast majority of support tickets are exactly those kind of issues, and ones that refer to actual bugs on their end are, comparatively, extremely rare, and should have to be escalated through normal procedures to weed out common problems.
Azure has its flaws but Microsoft puts a lot of people and effort behind it . We are not that large but there are so many instances where Microsoft reps will come in call with our customers or their people working with common customers will help out etc.
AWS has a done a decent job of taking enterprise business seriously last 10 years. you can get human support but generally they will charge you , I.e if better support you want you have to pay for premium support plans .
They are constrained unlike MS they don’t have non-cloud large enterprise business relationships for decades M365 or AD etc that helps with building the enterprise DNA.
In all three clouds it works best if you don’t buy directly, buy through a partner reseller , who both have the relationships to the CSP and have the people to work with you .
MS is the same network were even their lead engineers answer "well, uhh create a new account and hope you're not banned", when it comes to fixing a illegitimate ban issue.
None of the biggies are good. None of them.
You're better off building your own data enter. Can't believe I'm saying that, but I am. And it doesnt have to be acres and MW and water cooled. It can be a 42U rack.
Hell, I'm a homeowner and have 27U rack with 10U full, battery backup, solar, fiber and a backup internet connection, and stuff.
A small business could easy do this and own the hardware and software to their enterprise. In fact, they probably should. Helps prevent rug pulls!
>easy
Hell no
Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.
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.
Sure, I'm interested too.
> 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.
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?
It can’t hurt.
It boggles my mind anyone would base their business on their good will. By now it should be obvious that companies with a huge number of customers don't care about individual cases that much for obvious reasons. That's why they cut on customer support. You get much better support with smaller companies where you (as an individual or business) are much more important to them.
I would try to get help from your department. Somewhere within CS and CS-adjacent departments at Berkeley there’s likely to be someone with an official or unofficial connection to Google that can get you in touch with a human to at least clarify the situation.
What Google account? Is it personal Gmail? Or your academic account? Are you using this for personal reasons or professional or commercial reasons? What kind of payment method is attached? What was your level of usage? Any idea why you were suspended initially?
Because it could be that Google is reviewing your appeal and simply shadow-denying it, and you haven't provided the right information to make it look legit. E.g. if they think you're a spammer or mining crypto or they think you're creating additional free accounts to use free credits, they're obviously not going to tell you what makes them think that.
But if this is for university-related work, and your university purchases IT+cloud services from Google (as they probably do), talk to your IT department so they can get you in touch with their institution-level support. Obviously, for the attached Google sales rep, the last thing they want is a CS researcher losing access to GCP.
Can I suggest a topic for your next research? "Cloud exascalers and their negative impact on the society"
We seriously do need this kind of research and compelling articles that argue why relying on these big tech cloud services is harmful for individuals.
If it's so important, maybe talk with a lawyer.
1. Forget the account and move on. You could create a new one, but nobody can tell how long it would take before that gets suspended as well.
2. If the suspension has a tangible negative impact on your profession, hire a lawyer and get proper legal advice.
Most important of all, let this be a lesson for you and your colleagues. It is a terrible idea to let any critical part of your life depend on unregulated industries that can wipe out someone's livelihood at the whim of machine learning systems. Learn this lesson and pass it on to everyone you know.
As an individual, you are nobody to Google and you have no leverage. It is reckless to build your livelihood or profession around their platforms. If you were a company, your team could speak to an account manager and negotiate. As an individual, your only real leverage is legal action.
Stories like this appear every month. I don't know how many more it will take before it becomes best practice not to depend on these utterly abominable rackets for anything critical.
Nah, big tech infiltrates everything, it’s 100% their fault. Why did everyone switch to webmail? Why did we gravitate to web apps? Big tech persuaded us all to do it.
With big promises comes great responsibility, and the stuff in the fine print doesn’t count. It’s not ethical to invite dependency and randomly kneecap people; it shouldn’t be legal either.
I mean, we get these stories every month. Yes, 100% it is not ethical to randomly kneecap people. But let's be honest. Nobody is working on making these big tech companies accountable for the potentially devastating, algorithm-driven decisions they take. How many more times do they have to fool us before we all realize that it's time to move away from them?
All I ask from you, myself and all the tech folks here is to learn from these lessons and pass them on to everyone around you. With how things are today, it is reckless to depend on these big tech cloud services for your livelihood and profession. If you're working for a company where the company has leverage, all good. But as an individual, you should stay away from these big tech companies, because they can screw up your life any day, without warning and without recourse.
So there are at least a dozen perfectly good reasons this guy is panicking that his account was suddenly revoked without warning.
or have an alternative ready
for serious work -- don't use google & don't use google devices either
They somehow managed to charge partial amount (like 80% of the bill), but decided to turn off everything anyway, even the services that could be covered by those 80%. They turned off what they offer for free, and we were unable to change the setting, like instead of their CDN point traffic to an S3 bucket, etc.
When they do that they basically freeze your account. I mean you cannot provide a new card to pay the outstanding bill, or do anything at all actually. You're not welcomed here anymore. Locked out. That's is a terrible way to react to a payment failure after being a paying customer for a few years.
It was hard to reach the support, and it took multiple days until I found someone on Reddit who looked at our ticket and it eventually helped.
PS I had much worse experience with GCP after being a loyal customer of them for like 15 years, so Clouflare is good.
Had a sales call with CloudFlare, they said yes they do flat rate billing and it's only $200 a month for all we can eat image hosting.
We of course called bullshit and third time around (talking to human sales reps) we said, just to get it in writing, we can do X bandwidth/Y images for $200 a month?
...oh errr, no, that would be more like $7k.
Thankfully we smelled bullshit and didn't take sales word for it. We'd have built an integration and started paying only to be bitten a month or two later when they readjusted our pricing. They basically refuse to talk about real pricing until you're already paying $200/m and locked in.
We ended up hosting our own on GKE for $500-$1k/m.
I think documenting these cases somewhere, and targeting not just Alphabet but all the other "we're too big to support little people like you" companies would be a good idea. I don't think the pay out would be significant, but the punitive impact might change things.
All clouds reject a lot of businesses for their services for variety of reasons and there are alternatives in the market unlike say a Google account suspension .
I don’t think class action is feasible for cloud computing suspension (unless of course they are discriminating against a protected class etc)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
> Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm.
In this case, people who use GCP have customers and other contractual relationships. Google's termination of service interfered with that. Google also doing this as a matter of standard business practice indicates that they are aware that their action will interfere with people's contractual obligations (well common sense should tell them that anyways).
You can't force someone to sign a contract with you that says "if I interfere with your future contracts with arbitrary third parties on purpose, you can't sue me". The deliberate part is crucial from what I understand. If their decision making couldn't have accounted for the interference, and the interference wasn't calculated as an acceptable risk, there is no issue. But the plaintiffs can claim that repeated social media posts and acknowledgements of said interference by Google over the years means it's enough grounds for a suit. and a suit will mean discovery, google will have go hand over internal documents, depose employees,etc...
In the end, this might be more costly to companies like Google than just giving customers a grace period to move elsewhere before termination.
Obligatory: IANAL, I'm just a guy using big words I barely understand.
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.
I’ve always wondered why, this makes sense.
Call me cynical but I have little to no hope that even class actions would solve anything. These companies have become so big that they can take one class action after another for years to come without making a dent in their financials and without bringing any change to their operating procedures.
Given how dependent we all are on these services: we run our businesses and our lives, it’s despicable that more due process and transparency is not offered for shadow and proper bans like this.