As a technology consultant that has worked with hundreds of businesses in every state between astounding success and total disrepair, I have never in my entire career felt compelled to make a public issue out of poor corporate performance, but there are lessons and warnings here for other businesses that are too valuable to not share.

While prototyping a new mobile app business, we first started using the absolutely wonderful set of app tools in Google Firebase.

After having such a great experience with Firebase, when we needed to add some new infrastructure pieces during development, we figured we might as well try Google Cloud instead of AWS.

You quickly learn that Firebase and Google Cloud are kind of the same thing. For example, Firebase Functions are actually Google Cloud Functions and can be accessed using either system using completely different platforms and totally different interfaces.

Essentially, Firebase takes several Google Cloud components and puts a nice wrapper around it, providing an unparalleled suite of tools for app development.

Firebase and Google Cloud have some wonderful features that are spectacularly developer friendly compared to AWS and Azure. This is where Google Cloud really shines.

Where Google Cloud does not shine is poor reliability, poor performance and poor support across several business divisions and critical infrastructure components to a degree that is absolutely stunning.

A sampling of our ongoing issues in a basic Google Cloud project

Internal database storage (in managed databases!) can run rampant, causing you to pay dramatically more than you should

We are currently being billed for 1000% (!) of our primary database size because the internal log purging mechanism doesn’t work correctly and transaction logs stack up for far longer than they should.

“Engineering is working on a fix.” No ETA.

Shockingly, this issue wasn’t found until we submitted a support ticket. This is absolutely jaw-dropping.

Similarly, managed database replica storage is more than it should be, also causing dramatic over-billing

We’re currently being billed 600% of the size of our replica database, presumably because transaction logs aren’t properly being cleared from it. There is no ETA. I’m not sure it’s even being worked on.

This issue was also not found until we submitted our support ticket.

I’m not sure how many total customers this impacts, but it has to be something like “a lot” because we are doing nothing special at all.

Customer-facing HTTP servers randomly stop working

Google Cloud Run serves customer-facing HTTP requests from Docker containers. These randomly stop working due to an internal issue with GRPC, Google’s remote procedure call framework. This issue was reported almost a year ago.

“Several of our customers were facing similar issues. Since its a known issue, the Engineers are currently working on a fix.”

Core services are nearing non-functional in basic scenarios

It takes literally 6 seconds for a Google Cloud Function to return a single row from a Google Cloud database through Google Cloud SDKs due to “cold starts.” Again, these are things designed to function together.

There is no fix and this has been a known issue for years.

Poor database performance during high write volume

This isn’t something you find on AWS, because RDS and Aurora use smarter default database engine tuning that GC doesn’t (and also doesn’t allow you to change.) We haven’t bothered reaching out about this yet.

Getting support shouldn’t be harder than the challenges you’re trying to get support for

The nature and art of engineering is a complex beast, and we fully understand that. You have to work through these things, and they never end.

Unfortunately, Google even makes getting support a bafflingly steep task, thoroughly riddled with a completely different set of issues.

Getting paid support is an absolute nightmare — in a hilarious, dystopian twist, we’ve had to desperately and frantically search for a way to give Google money so we can tell them about their own issues.

You literally can’t buy support on an account. You have to submit a request to create a Google Workspace organization — and you can’t convert your existing account. This means you need to sign up as a Google organization, using a different account, and be manually approved.

So we have account A, with our Google Cloud project, and now we have account B, after it was approved, with an an organization and no Google Cloud project.

So how is the Google Cloud project in account A supposed to buy the support plan that requires the organization that is in account B?

— Account A cannot be invited to the organization because “the account already exists.”

— The Google Cloud project cannot be migrated to the organization because the organization belongs to account B.

— The Google Cloud project cannot be migrated to account B.

So what are you supposed to do here? After six different billing support cases, including one where I drew the problem out on a whiteboard, we were finally directed to the right place — Google Workspace Support — which told us about an obscure tool they had called Invite Unmanaged Users which could fix this. Great!

We were finally able to get account A into account B’s organization, migrate all of the projects to the organization, and then buy a support plan! Hooray!

We set up users and permissions with our support plan (which is an entirely different can of worms) and then open a case for some of our database issues. Nice! After some back and forth with a nice fellow, they eventually escalated our issue to an internal team.

18 days later, internal engineering has confirmed multiple issues but none of the issues have an ETA.

We asked support if we could receive a direct contact or account manager to help facilitate handling some of these issues. They said that, yes, these things absolutely exist (i.e. a TAM, or Technical Account Manager), and to talk to sales and pointed us to a form to fill out. Great!

Surprisingly, the sales team was the worst interaction by far

That’s not something you expect. After outlining what problems we were trying to solve, we were told, literally verbatim: “We don’t just provide account managers to people.”

We had sort of figured that out since we didn’t have one.

We then asked “how much do we have to pay or have in spend for an account manager?” and they said “I really wouldn’t recommend that. You should use role-based support instead.” (Role-based support referring to the support plan we already purchased.)

When we informed them that, yes, we already had that, they just repeated themselves. Lovely.

So is this supposed to be an encouragement to grow your business and spend with Google Cloud?

Suffice it to say, the “Customer Growth Expert” (the title of these employees) had the opposite effect.

The Google payments system appears to be broken and nobody seems to know how it works or how to fix it

One of the things we needed to do with our Google account was to add a payment method, so we could make and receive payments.

We’ll just add our bank account. Or will we?

Every attempt to add our bank account (just a standard US bank account!) fails with an unknown error. It has been reported many times online with no apparent fix.

We have spent more than two weeks (!) with Google support trying to add a bank account to our account. We still can’t.

After a countless amount of back and forth with Google support, and Google support with internal account specialists, nobody seems to have a clue what is going on or how to fix it.

A warning

How is it possible that so many different business divisions — different tech infrastructure products, different engineering and product teams and different support teams — can fail so dramatically and simultaneously at basic reliability?

I don’t know.

But I do know that our usage pattern in Google Cloud is basic. Running any kind of technical operation will not get much less complex than what we’re doing.

I’ve shared some of this feedback with Google Cloud support, and this was their response:

“Thanks for your honest and transparent feedback. I think it’s really pertinement and I agree with you.

I passed it over to the Product team to make sure your feedback is properly addressed.”

As nice as that is to hear, this feels like yet another piece of feedback sent via paper airplane into a bottomless void.

As an avid AWS user across dozens of businesses and AWS accounts, I know that you will absolutely run into internal AWS issues as well. I’ve personally discovered internal breaking bugs in ELB, RDS and Aurora to name a few (and getting them resolved is even more painful than Google Cloud.) But — and this is important — these are almost always during complex edge cases.

Given the fact that we’re running into these issues with GC at a small, basic scale, it is absolutely daunting to imagine what would happen at a larger, more complex one. It’s nauseating to think about; you’re basically completely on your own.

Migrating to AWS would be a painful process, not necessarily due to the technical implications, but because Google has nailed the developer-friendliness of their platform and that’s been amiss anywhere else.

It really sucks to have to choose between ease of use, performance and reliability, and be completely left out to dry as a small business no matter what you do when you need help, but that seems to be where the cloud game is at right now unless you’ve got a seven-figure spend (this is the spend required at AWS to be taken seriously; no idea what the secret amount is at GC, since they wouldn’t tell us.)

I love architecture and looking at houses, so I often hop on Zillow (or the regional equivalent) and browse homes in the different areas of the world that I travel to.

It always surprises me when I see closets and garages, particularly in America.

Here’s one closet I found recently:

This is one of the marketing images for this home, so this is apparently meant to entice me.

How often does each item get worn?

How many of these items have ever been worn?

How much life satisfaction does this closet provide?

What about the closet below?

Does this closet provide 10x less satisfaction than the first closet?

If not, then what is the point of having the first closet?

Does the first closet provide any more life satisfaction than this one?

Does it provide less than this one?

If you’ve ever cleared out a drawer, garage or closet, you’ve probably had this series of realizations:

1. Wow, there’s a lot more stuff here than I thought.
2. Wow, it’s satisfying to get rid of this stuff.

The main reason most people buy stuff is because their mind wants to feel good. The easiest and fastest way to feel good, that most people know, is by buying things.

Unfortunately, it’s not even that things make you feel good, it’s the anticipation of getting a thing that feels good. This is why buying things is exciting all the way up until the minute after you acquire them.

And so the process and problem of consumption is fully defined:

1. Feel the desire to feel good.
2. Buy thing to feel good.
3. Feel good for a few seconds.

Because you want to feel good, and because nothing else is providing it, you repeat this process, over and over, for your entire life.

The state of existence with 100 items is the same as the state of existence with 10,000. This pattern will never stop, even if you literally owned the entire planet.

The purchasing things method of feeling good gradually decreases life satisfaction — because things aren’t satisfying, experiences and actions are.

Life satisfaction isn’t positively correlated to being weighed down by things that aren’t satisfying; it’s positively correlated to freedom from unsatisfying things.

You cannot buy or consume your way out of this mental process. You must be aware of your own mental activity, and then choose to not participate in it. And then it will stop.

Our biological programming to feel good with the least effort, combined with societies around the world not set up to provide satisfying environments that make humans feel good without needing to buy things, appears to be our ultimate existential struggle, and will likely lead to our downfall unless it’s addressed, en masse.

• The universe existing.
• Minds existing.

If you are a problem solver of any kind, you must admit understanding minds is the penultimate problem solving project, right behind the problem of why anything exists at all.

No minds, no problems. Just the universe doing universe stuff. Minds introduce the concepts of problems and problem solving.

The universe appears to have evolved creatures that, frankly, take some issues with it.

Gravity? How about planes and rocket ships instead?

No oxygen in space? We’ll just take it with us.

The weather here isn’t ideal. Let’s try adding heating, air conditioning and water pipes. Actually, let’s just make our own weather.

Cancer? Really with this stuff? Let’s get rid of that.

In fact, this whole “death” thing kind of gives us the creeps. We’re going to be working on this one.

But we’re no different from the universe. We’re unable to find anything in the universe that exists as a truly independent system.

And yet, there is clearly something here that is experiencing sensory input that is unchanged by changes in sensory. The direct presence of consciousness, that appears to have no identifiable attribute, and only seems to appear situationally, in response to a particular arrangement of something that can only happen inside of brains, is the one thing that cannot ever be doubted. The entire universe could be an illusion, but the fact that experience is happening cannot be.

If we developed an advanced body scanner that scanned the molecular makeup of your body and mind, while you were awake, and built a copy of “you”, right next to you using a 3D printer, would your focal point of experience “teleport” to the other body? This seems preposterous.

Likewise, if we wanted to shoot you in the head since we just cloned you, you would still consider that being murdered.

Which means your waking consciousness cannot consist of merely a particular molecular makeup, that has now been duplicated. It has to do with something else — like a specific makeup plus your location in space, which makes total sense. Different objects and all.

But if the atoms of your brain and another could be swapped one at a time, while maintaining the same neural composition, it seems that nothing would change in your direct experience. Yet, for all intents and purposes, the atoms that used to make up you are now elsewhere, in a totally different composition. So then, it appears that your consciousness isn’t located on the atomic level. So what level is it at then?

Rarely, if ever, are our intuitions correct about cosmic matters, but perhaps it was correct all along that there are two types of stuff in the universe: physical stuff, and conscious stuff. We have a lot of tools to investigate the former but only a couple to investigate the latter.

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

We really do appear to be totally alone, stranded in a vast indifferent universe as apparently the most valuable things within it. We appear to have won the largest cosmic lottery possible, millions of times in a row, to end up where we are today.

If that is the truth, as by all accounts it appears to be, you really do have to confess that the only thing that can craft new, meaningful possibility is us. The highest wonder and the most powerful miracle isn’t to be found anywhere around you — it is you.

Given this apparent fact, it is profound and startling, and wondrous and tragic, how we treat ourselves and each other. Perhaps the brave and startling truth, the final truth, is that the only thing that really matters in the universe is love — and all of the benefits that will result from that realization.

That is, when we come to it.

Ask yourself the following: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m doing today?”

This provides instant clarity on what matters to you in a way that is very difficult to get otherwise. It’s very easy for the mind to become preoccupied with externalities, self-image, fear of loss, fear of the unknown, etc.

In the face of your impending death, which of these matter? None.

You are already faced with your impending death. These things already don’t matter, you just tend to think they do because you tend to lose perspective on your own life.

How does one adopt, and keep, a healthy perspective on their own existence? Thinking about it daily. You were conditioned into fear, and it’s possible to condition yourself out of it.

“But death is scary.”

What you are, experientially, is consciousness. Consciousness is not a thing that is living, or dying. It is a non-thing.

If you think death is scary, it’s because you don’t understand this fully.

Thoughts in the mind seem to have priority queues. Which makes sense because you can only be aware of one verbal thought at a time. There aren’t multiple voices stacked on top of each other, just one voice running constantly.

The brain is obviously doing way more than calculating one sentence at a time. So what gets queued into consciousness?

Tier 1 thoughts, the thoughts that come up most frequently, seem to be around processing your immediate environmental stimulus. What you see in front of you, TV, what’s on your phone, etc. Basically, the surface distractions of life. These thoughts seem to be very reactionary and are going on constantly.

Tier 2 thoughts, the intuitive, deeply creative thoughts, seem to be queued up underneath tier 1 thoughts.

Because life is filled with so many distractions, and you can only hear one sentence of thought at a time, and there’s only so much time in a day, if every moment of your waking life is filled with tier 1 thoughts, you won’t get to experience tier 2 at all unless they have the room to surface. That tier is where the brilliant stuff is. Where the dots connect. Where the inspiration occurs and where the real breakthroughs happen. And if it surfaces, will you even have the time to notice before it’s back to trivial thoughts?

It’s interesting to have direct first-hand experiences of the experiences outlined in The Art of Scientific Investigation. William Beveridge interviewed many prominent scientists, including Einstein, on how they achieved their greatest breakthroughs.

He summarized his findings:

The most characteristic circumstances of an intuition are a period of intense work on the problem accompanied by a desire for its solution, abandonment of the work perhaps with attention to something else, then the appearance of the idea with dramatic suddenness and often a sense of certainty. Often there is a feeling of exhilaration and perhaps surprise that the idea had not been thought of previously.

What incredible innovations has humanity missed because we were simply too distracted — or too focused — to notice? What have I missed? What have you? It is staggeringly incredible to think about.

I think that consciousness is seen by most people as an esoteric topic, and thus not interesting, and I think that’s because they can’t relate to it. Here’s a quick mystery that everyone can experience.

Consciousness is referring to the experiential space that sights, sounds, thoughts and sensations arise in that allow you to be aware of them.

1. Look in front of you.
2. Visualize an elephant.
3. Notice how you are simultaneously aware of the elephant and the real world.

These things are not happening on two different planes. The elephant and the real world are both appearing in your field of vision. Your field of vision is like a computer monitor.

You can do another experiment to see more clearly how this works:

1. Look at an object around you.
2. Visualize an elephant peeking out from behind it.
3. Notice that your mental image of the elephant is actually layered inside the real world, behind objects.

You’re able to do this because, again, these things appear on the same screen.

Here’s the fun part.

Where is your screen located? If we dissect your brain, we will not find any type of “visual screen” that allows you to experience this. Yet here it is, happening.

This screen appears to be created by the brain or projected to it. But where is it? And what is it made out of? And this screen is where you are, so where are you?

It’s hard for me to come to grips with the idea that I have any form of talent or strength in anything whatsoever. “Technical expertise”, yeah, I guess I feel I have that, in a few areas, relative to most people.

I’ve been sharing some of my thoughts about life with family and friends over the last year and I think they’ve threatened to disown me if I didn’t start publishing them.

In fact, this post is a result of that. Someone told me, “Stop what you’re doing and go publish something. Stop holding it back. People need to hear that.”

I said I didn’t feel like I had anything to add to anyone. Like I didn’t have anything worthwhile to give.

That most of us probably live in this mindset that, when we’re ready, or strong enough, or good enough, that we would feel something differently. That we are waiting to feel the feeling of being ready, or good enough, or strong enough.

And then it occurred to me. There is no feeling to feel. What would the feeling of “ready” or feeling “good enough” even feel like?

We think that we can’t be Superman, because we don’t feel like Superman. If we were Superman, we’d feel like Superman. But what would “feeling like Superman” feel like? There is no feeling of “Superman.”

We’ll never feel these feelings because they literally don’t exist. So why are we waiting for them?

They said “SEE? GO WRITE THAT! NOW!”, so I did. Hi.