I really don’t get this. There’s a huge number of complaints about poor communication from companies like Google and AWS during every outage. Yet they remain seemingly indifferent to how much customer trust they are losing, and the competitive edge the first one to get this right could gain.
I don't think they are losing any kind of customer trust.
Unless something is really fucked (like both GCP and AWS being down for us-east) incidents like these are not going to impact them at all.
The cost of either migrating to the other provider or, even worse, migrating to more traditional hosting companies is enormous and will require much more than "service was down for 2 hours in 2019". The contracts also cover cases like this and even if they don't, Google and Amazon can and will throw in some free treat as an apology.
On one hand I find this quite sad, but from a pragmatic point of view it makes sense.
If 20% of Google Cloud's customers leave after this outage because of poor communication they'll prioritise accordingly and apply all that nice SRE theories to their infra. But this isn't happening, because <various reasons>, so... who cares?
> "I care about how my providers behave when they have issues"
We all do.
As the other commenters stated, the communication is poor because the clouds are still growing rapidly and there's not much reason to be better. We might also be underestimating just how much more better service would cost and whether it's worth the revenue loss (if any). Are you really going to shift all of your spend overnight because of an outage? And where are you going to go?
The reality of these decisions is far more nuanced than it may seem and the current state of support is probably already optimized for revenue growth and customer retention.
