Surviving Downtime from Google Cloud: Here is what we learned ⏳

Hey Indie hackers,

Every challenge comes with a lesson, right? Well, I definitely got one after a shakedown we experienced recently with zcal.co, caused by Google Cloud. It all started with a cryptic email! 🎢

So, here is the story:

What happened:

1. Out of the blue, an email from Google Cloud (GC) lands in our inbox in the morning. The email hinted at an issue related to our billing account and notified us that our current project is deactivated, leading to zcal.co being completely down. 😰
2. We reached out to the GC team to learn more about the issue and were given a few steps to complete. Still don't know the exact issue but we quickly went ahead and finished those steps from our side.
3. After this, we waited for a few hours and tried to create a new Google Cloud project to bring our service online but it didn’t help. This is because our existing users database and calendar integrations were closely tied to our original Google Cloud project.

What we learned:

1. Customer support limbo is real esp. when you are not a high-priority customer and this turned out to be our biggest pain during this whole experience. Google Cloud only has email support unless you are an enterprise customer, so dealing with email support ping-pong and delayed responses was an unforeseen hurdle. Pro tip: explore all your support options before you need them!
2. In between all this, you know who rocked? Our users. Their messages of support and understanding kept us fueled and motivated to turn things around. Community power is no joke. When the chips are down, your users support means a lot! Keep those lines of communication open by keeping them posted on the updates.
3. Don't let the cloud steal your thunder. While in the waiting zone to receive the GC support’s email responses, one option was to stress out and feel stuck, and another was to focus on what we could control. So, we did the latter after doing the former for an initial first hour. We continued brainstorming features, exploring enhancements, and refining our roadmap. This led to us launching our ‘product feature request’ page (finally!) during the same time. Small wins do matter.

Where do we go from here:

1. Lessons learned, the hard way. We're taking this experience as a wake-up call to reassess our setup and implement redundancy strategies.
2. We're exploring ways to decouple dependencies and prepare for unforeseen hiccups. Our aim is to ensure that no single point of failure can bring our users to a halt.

In the end, it's all part of the startup journey – the ups, the downs, and the unexpected turns. We're sharing our story, not to boast, but to share the reality behind the ‘startup hustle’.

Cheers to everyone making it to the next day every day! 🍻