We've only raised a handful of support cases with GCP the past 5 years, but we happened to raise one this week and they've put us onto a preview feature that solves the problem we were facing - I'm suddenly wondering if we should be trying our luck with support more often instead of figuring it out ourselves.

I found two separate bugs in GCP products. One with gVisor where it would sometimes null-truncate large network packets (this was very hard to diagnose – why is my JSON full of null bytes?) and one where Cloud Run broke sudo sporadically (sudo in a FaaS is definitely niche, I had essentially containerized a very old application written by undergraduates).

Both times they were serious production bugs that took at least a week to resolve, though I only had the lowest tier of support package.

With my experience it’s the edge cases. The few times I had to reach out to AWS support were due to some weird edge case we couldn’t fix but AWS had to. And having a rep involved made it so much smoother.

if you need to bump a quota above the predetermined range of what googlers think is "normal" usage (which is far too low to run anything at scale)you have to talk to a human to negotiate the quota bump. why? because googlers in their infinite engineering wisdom use "gcp quotas" not as a cost optimization guardrail for customers benefit, but to inform google on when and how much metal they need to buy for their datacenter region you are running in.

One day, you will need support and when you do, you will realise why every week there's a top voted post on HN on someone complaining about not reaching Google Support

[dead]