Google Cloud May Turn All You Work Off Without Warning

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Google Cloud seems to have a couple of points of failure that have no human interaction whatsoever. In fact, it might just very well turn everything you rely on off, and give you no recourse to getting access to you data in a timely manner. This looks to have been all done because of a fraud warning put into action by the credit card from what I can tell, which we all know, happens all the time nowadays.

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.
 
Google is trying to rely way to much on automation to cut overhead. It never works out because there a circumstances that require cognitive thinking and negotiations. AI won't ever be able to correctly "reason" with someone. That kind of tech is too far away from reality at this point. Hench why it would eliminate us before it actually became coexistent with humans.
 
And if AI was that advanced. It would make changes to your project to improve it :)
IMO people put too much trust in cloud. Cant you buy your own cloud software instead and run your own cloud?
 
BloodyIron said:
And people say on-prem is "more expensive", well... It isn't, and what's more expensive is the chance you'll lose everything because you lack the control to stop them...

On-prem for me.
Click to expand...

As much as I agree, the people with the power and the purse strings usually don't know IT and/or just chase the bottom dollar.
 
If it's not advertising or search related you are a (distant) second class citizen with Google.

Anyone putting their entire business in Google's hands deserves what they get. And what they pay for. Use real hosts and providers, not tech geeks throwing out stuff as an afterthought.

It's a shame, because there is a lot to like about Google Apps for business. Unless you fork out for an enterprise account (and it's still sketchy but at least you can get a human to yell at) this guy's experience is to be expected. They just don't care.

I don't know how Google keeps all the positive buzz around them all the time. They talk about Apple fanboys...
 
Galvin said:
Cant you buy your own cloud software instead and run your own cloud?
Click to expand...

Well run in house infrastructure will always beat cloud providers. Or any other outsourcing.

The problem is the first part of my sentence: "Well run" is NOT trivial. If you have the internal expertise, have at it. But not many businesses can get or retain the right people to fulfill that "well run" part; so for them despite the other risks cloud can be a better bet.

And not all cloud providers are equal. There are some providers that, unlike Google, pride themselves on aggressive customer service. They also tend to cost more than Google - fancy that. You pay cut rate pricing you get cut rate service. Funny how that works.
 
Speaking of Google cloud-based services... anyone had to answer a Google Captcha (v2) lately? It's almost impossible to get through it now. Takes 2 to 5 attempts even clicking the correct squares. You are at their mercy, so you can easily be blocked out of any site that uses Captcha to verify you're a "human".
 
At some point all these eager Cloud adopters are going to regret ceding so much control over their IT infrastructure.

Hopefully it won't run them out of business.
 
defaultluser said:
Right, there's no SLA here with Google, so you take what you get. That's why the cloud is so much cheaper than doing it yourself.
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Well, there's no SLA if you're not paying them for it. Clearly this was an individual account and not a corporate/enterprise account, otherwise they'd have some way to contact someone for this issue. Realistically, if their company is as reliant on this setup as the article states, they should be paying for the Gold support level, which would provide 24/7 support and a 1 hour response from Google, not the automated system as is described in the article. They wanted to save a dollar today at the risk of costing them a dollar later. Murphy had some other plans for them. The 3 day deletion is a bunch of crock though.. AWS and Azure both handle things a good bit better.

The idea that they didn't have any real redundancy built in is also concerning. All your eggs in one basket? Sure, it's a big basket owned by a multi billion dollar company, but still not your own basket. This should have had a safe fallback method in place, tested and working, and then the "oh shit" rush wouldn't have been as severe.
 
Obligatory:
Cloud1.png
 
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It isn't just Google Cloud. I had a service subscription setup to auto renew using a CC. From one year to the next, the CC was compromised and replaced with a new #. The service waited until the last day to attempt to renew, got the decline notice because they had the old CC# and sent me one email stating the service was turned off. No 'We are sorry', no 'Do you wish to update your CC information?' Just basically 'It is off'. After venting at a CS person, they renewed with the new CC# and added a free month but didn't really apologize. They seemed more worried about someone getting a few free days then pissing off customers who for whatever reason had forgotten to update changed CC information.

Glad this power company got everything back up. The lawsuits would have been interesting if critical services had suffered a power loss and people had died.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
At some point all these eager Cloud adopters are going to regret ceding so much control over their IT infrastructure.
Click to expand...


dont worry, when that happens, management, who ordered such a move, will simply blame IT for what ever issues arise.

:oops:
 
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