How are you supposed to trust a company who told you they wouldn't screw you because of their own error, then screwed you anyway? Having a relationship with them doesn't matter if they still can't be trusted to do business. The type of payment method you use is not a factor that plays into whether you can trust your vendor.
I don't think you can. My takeaway from this discussion is definitely that GCP is only suitable for toy projects, and not for serious production stuff that requires continuity.
I feel like a lot of the problems that people run into with GCP are avoided with two main components.
Number one you should look seriously at the “enterprise” designation for different products and services if you are looking for long term stability and guarantees about the future (details: https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/resources/enterprise-apis) and secondly you need to buy actual customer support as an add on if you want to avoid the “I had to hit the front page of HN to actually speak to someone” scenario https://cloud.google.com/support
or just cluster over several other providers and make sure to test failover
the main problem with azure/aws/gcp is that their parent companies will track everything you and others do, and then close every related thing because they have enough market share to not give a fuck about you.
There are more than enough blog posts of enterprise customers running into random issues with the big thing, buying "big three, promise edition" isn't much of an assurance.
I'd suspect most of those customers have rapid migration plans written up. For a reason.
> I'd suspect most of those customers have rapid migration plans written up.
I can assure you from experience that most large customers do not. For either major cloud, most large customers will have adopted proprietary services like AWS Redshift or GCP's Cloud Bigtable or Bigquery. None of these have anything like the possibility of a "rapid migration".
I'm not sure GCP really comes up in discussions about "either major cloud". Distant third place, looking more like becoming fourth before they get to second.
I feel like you’ve just ignored everything I mentioned, made up a bunch of hand wavy stuff and ended up with what might be actively the worst idea (multi-cloud) as a solution.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is a sign of imbalance in the relationship. If you are too small to matter to Google or even to your account rep at Google, then you should not be using them.
>How are you supposed to trust a company who told you they wouldn't screw you because of their own error, then screwed you anyway?
I mean, it's an error.
Sure, it's infuriating, and in worst-case could financially harm (or cripple) your business. But Google didn't intend for it to happen. That makes no sense from a business perspective.
So, as others here suggest, you have to plan around the fact that mistakes like this can happen, especially when you're small.
I think the difficulty is (ESPECIALLY with Google and suspected fraud) that when they make a mistake, getting it corrected is basically impossible unless you know a person on the inside like an established account manager or a highly ranked exec.
I'd be inclined to think it's simply an error if people didn't return to HN to post strikingly similar stories month after month. Meanwhile, I rarely hear of similar stories with AWS or Azure or IBM or any other similar service.
