> It really is appalling

Never quite understood what's "appalling" about it. They've never had strong support for any dev/cloud-oriented services. I know some folks who've had good experiences, but those were exceptions, not the rule.

I'll say, I get the frustration with it, but it's why I've never considered using their cloud services for anything. I had a client who asked me to migrate all their stuff to google 'cloud compute' and their 'sql cloud' offering last year. It was a performance disaster; queries that were minor .1ms on localhost or in the same network were suddenly 18-20ms hitting google cloud. Spent a few days trying to dig in, and a few responses from various groups were "shouldn't be that slow" and "works for me" and that was about it. Gave up trying to get any real response from google (we may have got a 'looking in to it' response - I don't remember).

Thing was, I knew going in it wasn't going to end well, I just wasn't sure exactly why (maybe that's just too cynical of a view, but I prefer 'realistic').

I don't think it's fair you're being down voted, I get your point of view, so I gave you an upvote. But the thing is, this isn't some kid-in-a-basement free-but-ad-supported service where you-get-what-you-pay-for. Google's cloud offering isn't free (for any use beyond hello world anyway) and as a paying customer I'd expect:

1. Things to work 2. People to answer when things don't work 3. Things to start working again in a timely manner, with timely and concise updates along the way

Points two and three carry a lot of nuance, but Google's support does not. It's a virtual wall that people cry to and get no response back from, except for the rare few occasions when the Google deities decide to grace forums or mailing lists with their presence. It's just not a serious offering.

Now, you can pay extra for support, but even so it's going to be appalling. You probably will get to talk to someone at least, but in my experience you rarely get ahold of anyone who'll actually read what you've sent them, much less actually try to help.

My take away is that support and customer service is just not a priority for Google, what so ever. It's not even a low priority thing, it's a no priority thing.

It's appalling because you're a paying customer. I can understand free services not having support, but any service that's costing money should at the very least have a human being responding through email.

I believe that the standard approach for getting support from google is to hire an ex-googler who has good relationships with relevant people still at the company. It's ludicrous, but I've seen it work.

But you KNOW going in - there's no support.

You know this by

a) hundreds and thousands of horror stories from people saying "I did not get any support from google". You can counter that with "here are people who did get support", but the existence of the thousands of support nightmare stories out there gives you enough evidence to know that this isn't really "supported" in the way you might expect.

b) there are no phone numbers. https://firebase.google.com/support/ - no phone numbers. That's, of course, not the sole criteria you should use to judge potential support, but... it's google.

It's 2017. We have multiple years of knowing what Google's track record is re: support for paying customers. Outside of large adwords advertisers (where they make a lot of money), it's non-existent from a practical standpoint.

The big problem here is that firebase was fine until google acquired them.

I'm reminded of a time when I had a bad experience at a restaurant. Local place I went to with friends from work. We went... probably 4-5 times per year, and I loved the chicken sandwich they did. Last time I went, it was ... bad. Not what I'd expected at all. It was different.

Server asks "how's everything?". I said I was disappointed that the chicken sandwich had changed - it was not as good as before. Now... I wasn't actually complaining as in "comp the meal", but I was not a satisfied diner.

"Nothing's changed sir".

"um... yeah - this is nowhere near as good as it used to be".

"You're wrong, nothing's changed".

We had a back and forth, and they went back and came out "the cooks say the recipe is exactly the same".

This was getting a bit ridiculous. Manager came over, same exchange. He leaves, the comes back and says "they're right - the recipe is 100% the same. We have changed a few ingredients last month, but it's the same".

Maybe that doesn't actually relate to the google service situation at all now, come to think of it, but I was reminded of that situation when I started typing it :)

Oh yeah - nothing changed from OP's end, except how the new owner (google) decided to start monitoring and accounting for usage. Think of a "$9.99 all you can eat buffet" getting loyal diners, then changing owners, and the new owners giving some people a $95 bill at the end of the meal because they'd decided to also charge for any visits to the salad bar over 2. Most diners would never hit that limit, but a few - loyal diners for years - would have been (rightly) upset at the after-the-fact change.

> But you KNOW going in - there's no support.

I know this but to say everyone does or should isn't exactly fair. As well, you assume I am holding the purse strings, that I'm in any way responsible or even have a say in procurement. This may be true in my own business (it is) but not necessarily elsewhere, like my clients (it more often than not isn't) and you'll just have to live with poor decisions made on your behalf.

Also quite often, there's a sunk cost that makes switching that much harder. So no, it's not fair to say "Google has shitty support but that's ok because we all kind of know this." Paying customers can and should complain about this, loudly, shouting it from the roof tops. Ideally they vote with their wallets and just leave Google, but again that's just easier said than done in many cases.

Some semblance of professionalism shouldn't be too much to ask from one of the world's biggest corporations, an ask coming from paying customers no less.

"Ideally they vote with their wallets and just leave Google, but again that's just easier said than done in many cases."

That's the ONLY thing that will ever make this change, but it rarely happens because "sunk cost" rationalizations (and "maybe it'll get better next year!").

Shouting from the rooftops for years has not worked. This is not anywhere near a 'new' problem.

Yes, possibly some people don't know it, and yeah, I totally get that "you'll just have to live with poor decisions made on your behalf.".

I live with poor decisions all the time (mine and others'). But the notion that we can bitch about it on forums, or make 'formal' requests for better support - none of that makes a lick of difference to them (or, demonstrably hasn't for several years). It's "google", so some people will flock to it because of the brand, or because it's not azure, or aws, or whatever. Or to tick the 'cloud' box on their spreadsheet. Or because google gave them thousands in free credits to switch.

"Some semblance of professionalism shouldn't be too much to ask from one of the world's biggest corporations, an ask coming from paying customers no less."

But... it demonstrably is, and has been.

And... you'll get a client who will say "I can't believe this, email someone, get this fixed". At some point you have to push back and say "no, this is simply not fixable, you have to live with XYZ, or pay the cost of moving somewhere else".

An extremely large customer, maybe, possibly, might have a bit of say, perhaps. But even if you're dropping millions with them... for a company that measures revenue in hundreds of millions of dollars per day, you probably won't hold much sway. If you had that sort of budget to spend, and it was that critical, you'd likely be doing enough due diligence that research in to actual support/service levels (vs what the sales contact tells you) would be on the agenda.

Vote with the wallet is the only viable/impactful approach, and people have to be willing to forgo the sunk costs.

And for people that don't know up front - they always had the opportunity to search (google) beforehand. If they choose not to - caveat emptor.

10 years ago, we could possibly be forgiven for choosing google's services (GAE, etc) because there wasn't as much of a track record to look at re: support, etc. There's no good excuse for starting a project today on google compute and claiming ignorance of their support levels.

Ok, I've missed your point now – what are you actually trying to say? That Google being unprofessional and delivering on the whole sub-par services is OK because a lot (but not all) people already know this, and so really paying customers should just suck it up or go elsewhere, regardless of whether or not they even can in the first place?

If I've misrepresented what you're trying to say here please do correct me, because I clearly don't get it. If I haven't, I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree – I think customers should shout from the rooftops till they're blue if they want to, even if it seems to lead nowhere.

I think it's shitty. But it's also avoidable.

But to avoid it, you generally do research ahead of time. And/or be willing to actually walk away from your 'investment' on their platform and start again somewhere else.

In the OP case, they didn't sign up with google in the first place. It's doubly shitty for them, because they didn't ask for this, and could not have known in advance that google would end up being the support provider. Similar to when I refinanced a house, and 6 month later, my 'servicer' sold my loan to someone else with much crappier service (charge me $3/month to take an electronic payment from me? I wouldn't have chosen this as a service option).

Yes, paying customers should go elsewhere. Complaining about it to google directly and indirectly for a decade has not noticeable improved their support for their cloud offerings.

Suck it up or go elsewhere. You can keep registering complaints with them, or organize digital protests, or whatever, but to get better service, you will likely have to go somewhere else.

"I think customers should shout from the rooftops till they're blue if they want to, even if it seems to lead nowhere". Of course they can. They just need to realize it will not change the quality of support. Someone earlier (you?) said to 'vote with your wallet'. Shouting from the digital rooftops about how crappy service X is, but continuing to pay them, is a waste of time at best, and enabling at worst. Leaving for another service is voting with your wallet/budget, and it needs to happen.

Sure but voting with your wallet isn't, as mentioned previously, always an option for various reasons. Shouting from the roof tops is little recourse, I agree, but if nothing else it can be cathartic. I don't think that should be discouraged.

"as mentioned previously, always an option for various reasons. "

In the very short term, agreed - it doesn't do much good. But shouting from the rooftops internally (at client, management, stakeholders, etc) may do more good in the medium term.

So, you agree that Google's service is appalling, but claim that it is not appalling because the degree of appal has not changed over time? I cannot follow this logic.

Nothing you've said makes that any more acceptable. I don't care if we "know going in"; it's still unacceptable, and they should be investigated for it.

> But you KNOW going in - there's no support.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Also, from the article, Firebase wasn't google when they went in, plus it was a side project that suddenly took off, not a thought-out business plan.

totally agreed that it wasn't google. people signed up for firebase and expected whatever level of service they had with firebase to continue. google acquiring them, then changing things for the worse for existing customers with little-to-no documentation/warning/etc - it's inexcusable. but people will stay with them because "we're already here", and they'll continue the abusive cycle for years.

And yes, on the comic - ok, not everyone "knows" everything up front. But... you have search engines (google, even!) to do actual research beforehand.

I see small business folks and small consultancies do far more research on comparing various $7/month hosting plans via hosting review sites than I see people researching their decisions to use AWS vs Google vs Azure.

I made it a point a long time ago to never use any SaaS, PaaS, or cloud solutions from Google for anything important. First off, their offerings tend to be much more expensive than competitors. Second, Google tends to randomly drop features, services, and support for applications without warning whenever they want. Third, they don't have any actual support at all for anything. I use Linode for all of my hosting, and I can get tech support on the phone in less than 5 minutes even without the upgraded support plan. On top of this, Linode and DigitalOcean offer extensive community curated documentation for almost everything.

The above reasons are also why I don't use any open source software developed or maintained solely by Google. There's no guarantee that Google won't just stop maintaining it after a year or less. For a somewhat recent project, my co-founder and I evaluated using Angular2 for the front-end of our application. During our evaluation, we learned about Angular4. Knowing about what happened between Angular1 and Angular2, we decided to steer clear of the angular ecosystem. This decision also made more sense from the performance and ecosystem side of the argument. Most groups that develop open source software do their best to ensure that there is a well documented and simple upgrade path. Look at Django, rails, React, Vue, postgresql, etc for example. As far as I have experienced, Google products offer no such simple upgrade path.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what value Google is offering anymore. The only quality product from them I still find any use for is Gmail. Even Gmail has competitors that do Email better. I guess there's also youtube, but Google are kind of shitting that up as well.

I think the tech space needs to walk away from worshiping Google and Facebook. In all reality, the technical quality of their products is lacking and their entire goal is to lock both consumers and developers inside their own walled gardens.

I hear you. I've made an exception on angular2, partially because it's being baked in to some other tools I use, and I think those communities will help support it as well. And from what I can tell, the 'a2->a3->a4' is much more minor support numbering vs the "everything is redone" from a1->a2.

But this is a somewhat easier choice to make because I still have the code locally. Google could stop supporting it tomorrow, and it would not be fun, but things wouldn't stop working, unlike the firebase situation above, where the option is "turn off your app".

That said, I've generally been using knockout and vue (more vue recently than knockout) and both have been fine.

"Third, they don't have any actual support at all for anything". There's a lot of people on this thread that feel like because they're paying for something they should get support. And... while I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint, and agree they should, we've had 10+ years of seeing google consistently under- or non- support many services that people seem to want to base their entire businesses on.

Just as a restaurant can be appalling from when it was first opened and even if you don't visit it ever, other services can. Appalling doesn't depend on personal experience or lack of prior knowledge.

is there a typo here? 18ms seems like soemthing that could be designed into their whole infrastructure for some reason you don't know about (such as partitioning of networks, whatever) -- after all, it's a cloud solution, right? Maybe 18 ms tacked onto every request is fine for them.

To be honest, if all of my Internet requests were 18 ms slower I wouldn't even notice.

if I read you correctly and it wasn't a typo, could you mention why you cared so much? The .1 ms you quoted on localhost is extraordinarily quick and I wouldn't expect it to translate to a cloud...

Because we had a shitty codebase that made 350 SQL calls on one page (the user dashboard), so the primary page that everyone used went from < 500ms to > 8 seconds, and the end client who had to test and accept this change didn't like it. It became unusable.

To (re?)clarify - this was 18ms per query to the SQL cloud (from a google compute engine).

Yes, were there things that could be done to reduce that? Of course. The other guy on the project put some caching in, reduced duplicate DB calls, etc, and got it down to around 3-4 seconds, but without severely diving in and learning far more about this inherited codebase, there wasn't much that could be done to make it much faster.

The other steps involved heavier caching, which changed the actual functionality of the service that was contracted before. "real time status updates" had a functional definition of being within X seconds, IIRC. Caching everything so 'new' information wasn't necessarily available to an end user for, say, 3 minutes, wasn't an option, without getting a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. Not saying it wouldn't work technically, but the client relationship was already strained.

The move to google was primarily to 'save money' (because someone had $10k service credit with google), but the effort to make it work well on google cloud and SQL combo (wasn't my call) was too much.

You can say this isn't google's fault entirely - you'd probably have a strong case - but not everyone is moving pristine clean/strong/good code over, and problems with the original base were amplified by seemingly small issues.