Google’s Mission Critical Services offering raises the bar for cloud customer support

Source:-https://siliconangle.com/

Google LLC debuted a more robust customer support service for its public cloud infrastructure platform today called Mission Critical Services, aimed at customers wanting to ensure that their most critical business applications will never fail.

Google Cloud Customer Experience Vice President John Jester told SiliconANGLE that some of Google’s cloud customers have extremely demanding environments, and that even a minute of downtime can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Jester called out financial services, telecommunications and retail, all of which Google Cloud has focused on serving, as needing especially bulletproof applications in the cloud. And if anything unexpected happens, they also need nearly instant service to fix the problem. “What matters is that the customer’s application is always up,” he said.

To help these customers, the company has announced Google Cloud Mission Critical Services, which is one step up from its Premium Support service. MCS, as it’s called, is actually more of a consultative service: Google partners with customers from the get-go to ensure that their application infrastructure will always run without a hitch.

To do that, Google applies the same methodologies that it uses to support its own cloud infrastructure. They include a set of core concepts developed by its expert Site Reliability Engineering teams over the past twenty years.

Jester said Google will partner with customers that sign up for MCS on a step-by-step process that covers assessment, remediation and onboarding in order to bring their entire application architecture, including control, observability and measurement, into what it calls “Google-standard Mission Critical Operations mode.”

The assessment phase will involve ensuring that customer’s architecture is designed with the correct level of resiliency they need and that they have the correct balance of control and agility. It will also check that customers are instrumenting the right monitoring systems and signals, and assess how they are setting and raising service-level objectives to meet the required standards for their apps and services, Jester said.

Google’s MCS team will also help customers continually improve their application environments through biannual tune ups, architecture reviews and other ongoing checks to ensure no problems ever arise. Jester said Google’s engineers will quickly develop a deep familiarity with MCS customers’ workloads that will enable them to monitor, prevent and mitigate any impacts rapidly.

Indeed, MCS, which Jester said was nine months in the making, involves a five-minute service level objective for a response, compared with the Premium Support level’s 15 minutes. In those five minutes, Jester said, Google will set up a “war room” with experts who already know the company’s applications to address the problem.

“Not all cloud application workloads are the same, and some are much more critical than others,” said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller. “This offering will be appreciated by customers that want and need extra robustness for their next generation applications. It will likely only be a few weeks before Amazon and Microsoft will respond with similar offerings.”