Contact for Open Source organizations?

[kallisti5]

I'm one of the board members for Haiku, Inc.    We publish a public operating system images for use on GCP services and are running into some difficulties publishing a public image.

I've searched high and low, and cannot find any support contact points for Open Source organizations. Does anyone know who we should be speaking to at Google Cloud as an open source organization?

Specifically:

"Public OS images are provided and maintained by Google, open source communities, and third-party vendors." -- https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images#os-compute-support

Who should Open Source Communities be talking to? 🙂

[DamianS]

Hello @kallisti5  ,Welcome on Google Cloud Community.

@Manish_B would you be able to help here ? I've also didn't found any relevant documentation or contact path regarding that.

--
cheers,
DamianS
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[kallisti5]

Lol.  @Manish_B closed the issue I opened.... so is the expectation that "any open source organizations pay for support for the privilege of basic assistance publishing public cloud images for other Google Cloud users?"

That's kind of the feeling I get.  It's pretty frustrating... I might as well start steering users who are interested in running our machine images to other operators who have some basic open source community support teams / contacts in place.

[DamianS]

Hi @kallisti5 , which issue has been closed ? This one ? https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Infrastructure-Compute-Storage/Contact-for-Open-Source-organ... or another one ?

[DamianS]

@AndrewB , do we have any relevant contact options for such cases? 

[alexmoore]

It looks like the original issue has been resolved? at least the image is deployable.  

If you are still seeing 403's are you able to share more details on the steps being taken to deploy? 

[kallisti5]

Yeah, after a few days of troubleshooting it turns out the user attempting to use the image we deployed did so incorrectly in whatever CI/CD system they were attempting to run the image in.

The core question of "who should open source orgs be talking to" still exists though.

I know the model @ GCP is "don't talk to customers unless they're paying for support  too", but the extreme level of that does leave some groups disenfranchised.

Nobody's expecting a P1 "within an hour response", but some technical queue for not-for-profit customers where "we'll answer it in a few days / weeks as time permits" would be nice.

[alexmoore]

Great to hear your problem is resolved.

There are a range of community forums you can join and participate in that Google support, including this one. 

[kallisti5]

@alexmoore 

That's an incredibly frustrating response. Let me rephrase. Who does Debian talk to at Google to coordinate creating operating system images?

I'm pretty sure it's not "The forum"

I can go ask the Debian maintainers, but it's a weird path to take to find a Google contact.

[alexmoore]

Apologies, this forum really is intended for technical questions around usage of Google Cloud and from what I understand your original issue around creating an image has now been solved.

In the case of Debian, I believe the team are active on the Debian Cloud mailing list (https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/) so perhaps that is a path to explore depending on what exactly the nature of your questions are.  Hope that helps.

[kallisti5]

Thanks, that's helpful.  So essentially Google employees are in the Debian mailing lists.

As for why i'm asking here, it's the only contact path I could find.  Just to play Devil's advocate, @alexmoore where should someone ask Google / organizational questions like this?  The only publicly published contacts @ Google Cloud are sales engineers.