This was one heck of a rundown of different GCP options and problems. I haven't used as many services as the OP, but definitely most things that did overlap pretty much echoed my own experience.
Specifically, support and billing.
We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would be surprised if quality was any different.
Regarding billing, we've been going through some kafkaesque cycle there trying to set invoiced billing. I've filled a form on their invoiced billing page, a sales contact talked to me on the phone and I explained everything. She then sent an email asking me to fill another form, which I did, and then got contacted by another billing team who basically sent me to the original page. I explained the situation and they just didn't really seem to care or understand what's going on. They then tried to arrange a call, but missed two schedules that I've set, called the wrong number, wrong country code... Not sure where this phone call would lead. Absolutely mind boggling experience there. Teams don't talk to each other. They send the customer around running in circles. It's amazing that it's happening with one of the most sophisticated companies in the world in the 21st century.
Support seems pathologically bad. Obviously, the support people aren't well trained in all the various products and modes of failure, but they make no effort, take no ownership, and don't really escalate to engineering staff without a lot of hassle.
Had a problem with kube-api going down. I have alerting setup to detect such a thing. Opened a ticket, "I noticed outages for kube-api" gave them the specific times for the alerts, asked for an RFO and got back a response, "can you send me a screenshot of your monitoring software." Following which the support person set the case to "customer pending".
This kind of thing happens on 100% of the cases I open, usually multiple times from multiple support staff.
I am in a process of choosing between AWS and GC, and the reason I'm leaning towards AWS is that this is Amazon's primary business. They care about it and they know how to deal with customers. Google on the other hand... They could decide tomorrow that GAE is no longer something they want to deal with, and shut it down. Not likely, I agree, but their incentives and mine are not aligned.
I'm not with GCP but I'm fairly closely connected to its technical staff and user community and a heavy consumer and have been so for about 4 years.
It gives me a somewhat unique perspective where I'm happy to give them lip when they need it and they have at times and they also ask for my input fairly frequently. In my opinion they are all in on GCP and it's definitely going nowhere but up. They've been on massive hiring sprees and it's to the point that when I visited them at the Googleplex a few months ago a bunch of their campus buildings were now labeled as Google Cloud buildings.
Obviously logos can be removed and maybe it will say Android/Allo/whatever in 3 years but the team is incredible and they seem laser focused on growing the platform. You can go through their blog https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ and the improvements they're making and the pace at which they're making them is pretty great.
I've used them for ~4 years so I've definitely had frustrations, especially prior to them reorganizing their Support/Account Management structure about 6-12 mo ago (I do k8s so I interact with this side of things as infrequently as possible).
This is a huge money maker for them and I think they're doing a great job albeit they still need to focus on their soft skills (support, billing pains, etc).
I have migrated a few companies from AWS to GCP and they've all been happy. If the day ever comes to leave GCP I have no problem making that call; I'm not handcuffed to them. Hopefully they just continue to improve.
Thank you! This is interesting to know, and I'm sure the people there are really bright, capable and motivated to bring us the best solution possible. However this is not what concerns me. Willingly or not, they are part of a bigger ecosystem named Google, and the decisions from higher-ups inevitably influence the platform. The culture itself is probably engineer-centric and not customer-centric, which can be seen in differences in support responses.
I must stress out however that these are just my thoughts based on information from Internet, because I don't have extensive experience with either, so I might be wrong.
I've spent a good bit of time with both now. GCP has some real potential but AWS support is nothing short of fantastic. I leaned on them multiple times and had people actively working with me on the phone to get problems solved, following up with me, etc.
I was impressed.
Just got on the Silver plan with Google and only had one support ticket so far, but they got it resolved. Haven't really needed to push it yet, but we will see what happens.
I have a single dependency on Google for my business and I would never take on another one voluntarily. All the horror stories you've heard about Google support have been true for the 10+ years I've been dealing with the Google Maps team. Every year they find some new way to screw up their customer support.
And that's before you even get to your legitimate concern about Google's long-term commitment to any of their offerings.
Specifically, support and billing.
We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would be surprised if quality was any different.
Regarding billing, we've been going through some kafkaesque cycle there trying to set invoiced billing. I've filled a form on their invoiced billing page, a sales contact talked to me on the phone and I explained everything. She then sent an email asking me to fill another form, which I did, and then got contacted by another billing team who basically sent me to the original page. I explained the situation and they just didn't really seem to care or understand what's going on. They then tried to arrange a call, but missed two schedules that I've set, called the wrong number, wrong country code... Not sure where this phone call would lead. Absolutely mind boggling experience there. Teams don't talk to each other. They send the customer around running in circles. It's amazing that it's happening with one of the most sophisticated companies in the world in the 21st century.