The only time I ever got an email from a real human at google was when I tried out google cloud for a weekend when it first came out. I had a detailed plan to benchmark different instance types and compare them to AWS for an upcoming project.<p>I got about two hours into this and my account was deactivated, one of the cloud engineers sent me a truly nasty email saying that bitcoin mining is not allowed on google cloud and I should stop abusing resources and being so irresponsible. I replied and asked how on earth they came to the conclusion I was a bitcoin miner and explained what I was actually doing, but never heard back from them again.<p>It was so bizarre, I felt like I was back in the 3rd grade getting in trouble for knowing more about the Apples than the computer teacher.
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc. We use AWS instead who has so far been very good at the support side.
I suspect there's more going on here than meets the eye:<p>- This is the first post on a new blog by somebody without a full name or any social media presence that I can find (googling "amton gaming blockchain" returns zero hits)<p>- The company/site in question is never named or linked to<p>- They used somebody else's credit card and don't seem to have matching ID for it<p>Is "blockchain gaming" code for an online casino or something? If so, this is likely against GCP terms of service.
> They have full control of your project.<p>Correction, you _gave_ them full control of your project, when you decided to use their APIs and tooling as the literal backbone of your application.<p>This is the tradeoff, and server administration is not something you can hack at, DevOps style. Proper external backups would've at least made switching away less painful.<p>If you wish to have full control of your data, you have to co-locate your own servers and run things on bare metal. Though running things on the cloud is a trade-off that many of us have made.
>>We have some backup files, but it doesn’t enough, we’ve never planned to have an automatic backup on Google Cloud because we’ve never thought about this situation is occurring today<p>Many companies are going to have learn this lesson the hard way, time after time see stories of companies under the impression that cloud == no need for backups.. its the cloud why would you need to back things up<p>This way of thinking will burn many many companies, even worse when you use a SaaS product that has no ability to export data so you are locked in... those companies are screwed
Isn't this the price of doing business?<p>I'm not being facetious, but ops people have always decried giving up control of the platform and especially buying into lock-in to services that only exist in a particular cloud.<p>If there's no corollary to firebase, and your app is built entirely on firebase, and they increase the price or change direction, you gotta go with it. I mean it's the definition of vendor lock-in; and it applies too when the political whims of the company change. IE; if you're making games and you're hosted on Azure, you have to have some level of knowledge that Microsoft makes games too, and that they could potentially subtly harm you if you're outcompeting them.<p>Everyone knows that you "buy" time, you "buy" less burden of operation and you "buy" the fact that you're living at a higher abstraction and can move more rapidly; this is baked in to the extra cost of hosting with a cloud provider.<p>Maybe people don't really know (or grok) that you also "sell" not only your competence, but your self reliance?