I know why Google Cloud is falling behind

It was supposed to be a great day for me as I was traveling to Las Vegas for the furniture market and source some beautiful items for our newly launched website huedeck.com. It turned out to be a nightmare when the flight touched ground. I received an email from our lawyer Michael saying that our site seemed to be down as soon as I turned on the phone. Almost at the same time, our colleague Roger sent a message to me, reported the same thing. No way, you must be kidding me! I was browsing around the website just before the flight took off. I quickly brought up Chrome and hit our site and it turned out to be a big brutal “Server Error” on the screen. Shit, I was about to show our potential suppliers our brand new concept on our site (shit happens right on the demo day?). What just happened to our site hosting on Google Cloud!

I found a spot around the slot machines, brought up my laptop and started to dig into the problem together with Roger over the phone. First it seemed to be a billing problem as it asked me to enable the billing account (which I already had for both the owner accounts of the project and we have been paying to Google Cloud for a few months under those accounts). Ok, let’s enable it anyway and hopefully that solved the issue. No, same error. We walked through all the components of our website and made sure all of them were running. No, Kubernetes didn’t talk to SQL. As newbies in Kubernetes, this turned out to be long hours of trouble shooting on the Kubernetes settings and all the IP and proxy stuff. We had walked through all the configurations and made no progress. After hours of fight, we still had no idea on what could go wrong, we simply wiped out everything and deployed a new SQL, a new cluster with new nodes and new services, everything brand-new with the SAME SETTINGS AS BEFORE and IT WORKED finally!

After a whole long day of trouble shooting, I started to get a clear clue what was going wrong with our Google Cloud. I used my own email to register for the Google Cloud account at the beginning and about a month ago I realized it was not a good thing for the team so I added a new developer email as the project owner too (both my email and the new developer email have been the project owners thereafter). To make sure Google gets paid (what a good customer we are), I updated the payment method and billing account for the new account right after that. The new account was taken on free trial as it received the $300 credit (but the old account was an upgraded account as we had been paying Google for sometime). What happened today was that the free trial on the new account got expired and Google stopped the services right after that. But we didn’t take that as we never received notifications (email or anything) from Google telling us ahead that it would stop service. We even paid our latest bill about two weeks ago to Google Cloud on that account. Apart from that, our old account is an upgraded account not in free trial. What made us even more upset was that after Google stopped the service, they didn’t even send an email to us. What is going on with Google, it shall not be doing things like that as a $800B company!

I have heard a lot about a joke goes Google makes genius products for developers , but just craps for enterprise. I always agree on the first half of it. And not until today, I didn’t really realize the later half. There were a lot of things in here that Google could have done right for us. But it didn’t and we bearing the cost of it.

Ok, in the terms here (https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier#end) it does state that Google will stop all services as the free trial ends, we must upgrade to a paid account to continue using GCP. But I don’t think this shows a good integrity from Google as the terms don’t put the users at the first place. In reality, it is such a bossy tongue that forces you and he would only say the word for once and never remind you again. After that, it says we “might” receive a message stating that your account has been cancelled. Ok, so we may or may not receive it, it is totally up to his mood and availability.

Last month, I received an email from Amazon saying that my AWS free tier was expiring in three weeks time. They don’t take free tier users as trashes and really want them to continue to use the service. These details make a total difference. After all, uptime is the first most fundamental thing for internet companies! Guarantee the upmost uptime builds great reputations for a cloud provider, don’t know why Google still don’t get it and choose to unplug things without asking.

Google does make some great products, I love them and use them every day. After today, I start to realize why Google Cloud is falling behind the other two, as mentioned in a few recent reports.