Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced one of its biggest blunders ever when UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, had its Google Cloud account wiped out due to some kind of mistake on Google’s end. At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members. There were joint statements from the Google Cloud CEO and UniSuper CEO on the matter, a lot of apologies, and presumably a lot of worried customers who wondered if their retirement fund had disappeared.
UniSuper’s mistake was relying too much on Google Cloud even for critical backups.
That’s not what I got out of that at all. It looks more like an errant setting made the account expire automatically after some amount of time, triggering the wipe.
What I got out of that is that gcp is not a stable product and should be avoided.
Errant settings that marked the account as delinquent/unpaid at the end of the month, triggering immediate and irrecoverable account deletion. Basically, the scariest part of the google cloud is if they think you can’t pay anymore, even if it’s a mistake, your account will be wiped along with the backups. They did say they’ll have more safeguard after this, but finger crossed.