GCP automatically lowered our quota, caused an incident, and refused to upgrade

I keep getting badgered by GCP channel partners to move over to GCP. One guy once said if I can show him our AWS usage he can give me exact configuration in GCP and cost would be 20-25% less. I was intrigued so I shared. He came back with a price estimate higher than our AWS bill! I haven't entertained them ever since.

Just an anecdotal counter point: very happy with gcp.<p>Best network from all and coherent modern ui.<p>Not the usability hell like azure... (You know when clicking on a often used resource on the start page which let&#x27;s you jump directly to it but doesn&#x27;t allow you to jump a level up of all the other resources of the same type which totally works fine when you navigate to it the normal way... Or the huge hassle and complexity of resource groups for f everything...)<p>But you know the tweet not even states what quota was reduced.

We had a similar thing happen with our company. Google had given a bigquery concurrent query limit extension to 300 queries. In January they removed the extension back down to 100 concurrent queries because they were introducing “query queues” that should cover the difference.<p>Unfortunately for us, query queues only affect spikes in concurrent queries and not overall throughput. We’ve been struggling with bigquery support ever since.

I’ve recently had an issue where GCP keeps shutting down my e2.micro because they think I’m crypto mining. I have no idea what I’m doing to trigger it, and I don’t blame them for not sharing their secret anti fraud heuristics, but it’s a freakin e2.micro. They think I’m mining on that?!

Anecdotally, I know a paying GCP customer that recently got quota blocked on the number of global static IPs they are allowed to create. We could not figure out how to contact someone to increase it, and nobody knew why the quota was set so low (4). We just kept running into automated systems that gave circular information on how to request an increase. We kept getting links to sign up for a free tier account.

There was a follow-up Tweet that “explains” the problem:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JustJake&#x2F;status&#x2F;1667492928758095872" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JustJake&#x2F;status&#x2F;1667492928758095872</a><p>From the call with Google just now:<p>Them: &quot;You exceeded the rate limit&quot;<p>Us: &quot;We did 5000&#x2F;10min. The quota was approved at 18k&#x2F;min&quot;<p>Them: &quot;That&#x27;s not the rate limit&quot;<p>Us: &quot;What&#x27;s the rate limit&quot;<p>Them: &quot;Not sure have to check with that team&quot;<p>So, the quota is completely cosmetic...

A friend works at GCP and has told me this time and time again: if you don’t buy support from GCP _you have no support_.

I had to close my GCP account because I was being spammed with &quot;Action Required&quot; emails every day for a non-existent tax admin issue. Bug reports were immediately closed and getting through to a human seems impossible.

Why don&#x27;t I hear about these incidents with AWS? Is it just less common or different business takes on quotas and rate limits?

Hilariously reminiscent of Kafka:<p>Client: we were under the limit<p>GCP: No, you exceeded the limit<p>Client: Then what is the limit?<p>GCP: I don’t know

Tweet has basically no details

From my past experience Google is by far the worst when it comes to support. By far. Even if you pay for their gold support you&#x27;re lucky if you reach an engineer and even then they blame you for the problem with no &quot;proof&quot; or direction. Most unhelpful ever... See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;hackernoon&#x2F;why-and-how-we-left-app-engine-after-it-almost-destroyed-us-40ac2fc0b1a8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;hackernoon&#x2F;why-and-how-we-left-app-engine...</a><p>AWS were surprisingly helpful by comparison and even pro-active. Not a fan of theirs overall but much better than Google. This is a deep cultural problem with Google that also expresses itself in mobile development and everywhere: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;codenameone&#x2F;google-play-kafkaesque-experience-mp3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;codenameone&#x2F;google-play-kafkaesque-experience...</a><p>They aren&#x27;t the cheapest and their service is terrible. I can&#x27;t think of a good reason to use GCP.

In my limited experience, quota is one of the pain points of GCP. It&#x27;s where the cloud &quot;leaks&quot;.

Quota for what?

One thing I don&#x27;t understand is how in 2023 people use GCP with the bad level of IPv6 support they have. Other Google services usually support IPv6 quite well. Only GCP, to some degree Chromecast, probably Nest and the DHCPv6 problem of Android are some well known exceptions.<p>Google also tend to put algorithms first and people and their business second so that is why I would be very particular about using GCP for anything serious. We do use Google Workspace and for what we do with it, it is mostly ok, however rather expensive.

I&#x27;ve never used GCP for anything but demos, but on the other side AWS support is worth the (high) price: I always had my issues solved, quickly, and sometimes I was even able to put in feature requests that were shipped a few weeks later.

It feels as if Google is intentionally trying to sabotage its own cloud business

Google giveth, and Google taketh away. Blessed be the name of Google.

Wonder what does GCP side have to say on this

It is interesting to note the differences in apparent defensibility of companies such as Google and Reddit changing terms of use and behaviors of platforms.<p>According to the general sentiment on HN, Google is being mean to developers and shouldn&#x27;t get away with things like this, but Reddit merely has a rug and developers are silly to build things on top of that rug when it can be pulled away at any time.<p>I wonder why there&#x27;s a difference here.

Once Again: Do not use Google for anything. Given they treat the consumer side of their business like cattle (Gmail, maps, etc) (,and despite the fact that an email address is an essential part of one&#x27;s daily life: access to banking, investments, communication, cell phone, employment opportunities), they operate with absolutely zero support.<p>What makes you think they&#x27;ll treat your small business any differently? You will be thrown under the bus the second you make them lift a finger to help you.

the purpose of not aws is two:<p>- put price&#x2F;quality pressure on aws<p>- fill weird niches made by regulatory capture and other nonsense<p>not using aws is like not using linux. there are valid reasons, but you don’t want any of them.

This article seems silly, just add custom metrics to your app for what was fetched from cache vs DB. And label the metric by route&#x2F;query&#x2F;pattern. To control costs, don&#x27;t tick the metric for every single request, instead accumulate locally and post to metrics API every X minutes.