TLDR:<p>"Google has been spending tens of billions of dollars annually in recent years to expand its global cloud data center footprint. It’s also been adding enterprise-specific capabilities to the cloud platform – things like the recently launched managed Postgres (Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL), a service that takes the burden of managing infrastructure underneath the popular enterprise database management system off customers’ hands...<p>To close the support gap between itself and the market leaders, Google has introduced things like its Customer Reliability Engineer program – a high-tier service for customers running critical customer-facing applications in production and at scale on Google’s cloud. Customers that use this service get assigned Google engineers, referred to as CREs, who help them recover when things go wrong. 'If they go down, we’re going to get paged,' Ward says about the program. 'Google engineers will get on the horn.'"