So you want to build your own data center

I’m my experience and based on writeups like this: Google hates having customers.

Someone decided they have to have a public cloud, so they did it, but they want to keep clients away with a 3 meter pole.

My AWS account manager is someone I am 100% certain would roll in the mud with me if necessary. Would sleep in the floor with us if we asked in a crisis.

Our Google cloud representatives make me sad because I can see that they are even less loved and supported by Google than us. It’s sad seeing someone trying to convince their company to sell and actually do a good job providing service. It’s like they are setup to fail.

Microsoft guys are just bulletproof and excel in selling, providing a good service and squeezing all your money out of your pockets and you are mortally convinced it’s for your own good. Also have a very strange cloud… thing.

As for the railway company going metal, well, I have some 15 years of experience with it. I’ll never, NEVER, EVER return to it. It’s just not worth it. But I guess you’ll have to discover it by yourselves. This is the way.

You soon discover what in freaking world is Google having so much trouble with. Just make sure you really really love and really really want to sell service to people, instead of building borgs and artificial brains and you’ll do 100x better.

My AWS account manager took me fishing. That’s what you get for a >$1M/yr spend. I don’t sense they would roll in mud with me, which is kind of incredible. I wonder how much you need to spend to get into mud rolling territory?

AWS support in general is extremely good in my experience. (We pay for whatever the tier below Enterprise is called, I think it costs 10% of your spend)

I’ve been on 4 hour screenshare with AWS engineers working through some infrastructure issues in the past, and we only spend $100k/yr.

Even at the $100k/yr spend level, AWS regularly reaches out with offers to try new services they’re launching for free. We’ve said “sure” a couple times, and AWS shows up with 4-6 people on their end of the call (half of them engineers).

In the past 10 years, we’ve had maybe 2-3 emergency issues per year, and every time I’m able to get a really smart person on a call within 5 minutes.

This is the #1 thing I’d be concerned about losing if we did colo or bare metal with cheaper providers.

I've had similar experiences with Google as well. Reaching out with new services, hours with some of their technical people, invites to meetups, free credits, an extremely pleasing and responsive account manager. We spend a few hundred thousand dollars a year with them. The actual software is top notch. Most haven't been just turn it on and forget it.

Yeah, I'm a little biased here as I now work at Google, but I joined in part due the positive experience we had migrating from bare metal to Google Cloud.

We went through two rounds of migration. First placing our data warehouse, where BigQuery was just so far past Redshift it was almost a joke. Then we wanted to move to a cloud provider with good container orchestration and GKE was obviously better than AKS and all of Amazon's proprietary orchestrators. It was pretty good.

Customer support varied between excellent and ~fine. Amazon customer support throughout that time (we had a few small bits on Amazon) was fine, but less enthusiastic about winning our business.

Not long after a friend of mine reported a security incident to AWS, something that looked like Amazon privileged access to their data, and it took months to get a response from them, and it was never an adequate explanation for what looked in all ways like a hack.