I see some Google Cloud folks in the comments, so question for you, if you're able to share:
There seems to be a general fear about Google potentially killing off a product, based on recent history [1]. Now I know most of these are on the consumer side of things, but you can imagine people's concerns if the same thing started happening to Google Cloud products. Is the GCP team aware of these concerns, (or is this just a HN crowd concern) and if so, are there steps being taken to address this perception head on?
When a company like Deutsche Bank [1] signs a 10-year deal, you can be sure that they have been convinced that the products they rely on will not go anywhere.
I don't work in cloud, I work in a completely different part of Tech. However, we do deal with big clients, and essentially it was always a different game for them- extended support for products, alpha/patch releases where necessary, because those businesses drive so much revenue and the last thing you want is for the corporation at an organisational level say "We're a <vendor> client".
That doesn't help the smaller developers though - you just have to hope that Deutsche Bank wants the same things you do, which is.... unlikely.
I think that would be one of the benefits of being Google (or Amazon, or MS) -- their cloud strategy isn't as beholden to a single customer.
Which means they may or may not do a good job of feature prioritization, but it's not always "whatever (big customer) wants."
FWIW, when I worked for a larger GCP customer, they seemed fairly decent at hearing about and addressing concerns. I realize cloud functionality (especially interfaces) is accreted over the years, and can't be delivered all at once.
Comment like this makes me wonder if you ever worked in enterprise before. Plenty of services/products have been cancelled/mothballed on large enterprise contracts once the services/products are no longer profitable, the services/products generally get sunsetted.
What if you aren’t Deutsche Bank? Parts of the products they depend on are mostly safe, what about features they don’t use, but my small shop depends on?
Shh... The product marketing-authored deck on common objections doesn't care about SMBs. No offense to the original comment, but that's such a rehearsed answer that as you mentioned is irrelevant (despite sounding good on the surface) to everyone else.
A contract like Deutsche Bank means dedicated GCP customer engineers, professional service engagements at the highest levels, direct conversations with individual product leaders/managers, roadmaps conveyed to their needs, alphas etc etc.
If it's irrelevant to the Deutsche Bank's of customers, then it's of course fair game to get f'd with.
That actually doesn't mean anything to me when I personally have had to deal with the shut off of many, many Google products and your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way.
> your competition (AWS) is better in every conceivable way.
Is that really true? I don't have a lot of experience with Firebase, just notifications and analytics, but working with Cognito and Amplify one- two years ago was like a bad joke, more similar to a fledgling startup than a well-rounded offering.
It rather seems to me that a lot of organisations are moving to GCP; BigQuery and its integrations with other Google products seems like a killer app, and GKE is seen as the better choice for hosted Kubernetes.
I'm still a fan of Red Hat's OpenShift, but I'm actually surprised how well Google seems to be managing their {S,P,I}aaS offerings and strategy in this space.
I had GCP kill my servers without warning because they claimed someone was mining crypto on them (they weren't). That alone was the permanent end to my business relationship with Google.
I should have known better though. Like I said, I've been through a lot of Google shutdowns and various screw jobs (remember the Google App Engine price hike?).
AWS is a professional product. It has warts but it's much more solid than GCP, technically and from a business perspective.
As a user of GCP, this really feels like a HackerNews meme that doesn't have any substance. I have never had a GCP feature killed, but I've had many AWS features mothballed. I am not really sure how to change the perception here since it's easy to say: "Google kills products-- therefore I will never use any Google product†"
We've had to deal with a few. They removed a gcs api a couple years ago and told you to update to the newest version of the sdks. obviously they didnt tell you which version it was actually fixed in, figuring that out was an adventure in itself. everyone's runs off master right? Worse, they hadnt even updated all of them by that point.
We updated to working versions, but support kept telling us we were using the old one. Turns out they didnt update the dataflow runtime, which they own and we cant inspect or update, and they were reporting it to us for us to fix...
What, exactly? AWS is legendary for maintaining compatibility. Steve Yegge's article gives a good break down on how infamous GCP's deprecation practices are.
I was lucky in that GCP killed off the feature I wanted before I ever used it, so I didn't have to get burned in production. AWS has never burned me. (GCP used to have a service to do transformations on images in object storage, which I learned about in an App Engine book. It took me a few hours of searching to even find the deprecation notice. Now I just use https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-handler because I don't trust GCP).
For me, AWS Opsworks. It felt like once containers came into vogue, they stopped working on the product and it was nigh impossible to switch back to vanilla Chef.
Oh, I misunderstood what you meant by mothballed. Still, that is honestly a good example of why AWS is so much more reliable than GCP. AWS will keep the service running as-is even if they don't make any changes to it. GCP would just deprecate it instead and kill it off completely. Maybe that hasn't affected you yet, but the available evidence says that it has burnt plenty of people.
We can't even be sure whether GCP itself will be around in 3 years:
> In early 2018, top executives at Alphabet debated whether the company should leave the public cloud business, but eventually set a goal of becoming a top-two player by 2023, according to a report from The Information on Tuesday. If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely. [1]
That's disputed and is not hard data, but there's not any positive reason to believe that GCP will exist after 2023 either.
That alone is more than enough to substantiate what I'm saying, but if you need more examples than just search or read HN a bit, due diligence, etc. I was personally lucky in that I got burned in the planning stages and didn't have to get burned in production, but I still wasted all that planning time and ended up having to use AWS instead.
I understand the problem you’re talking about, but the way you said “available evidence” made me think you had something more data-oriented than Steve Yegge’s blog post and HN comments.
Since you work at Google, you should be well aware of the deprecations. You don't need evidence of their existence, you just don't see it as a problem. Which you are free to do, since it's not a problem for you, it's just a problem for GCP clients, many of whose complaints you seem to be dismissing as not being "data".
GCP doesn't seem to provide a full list of deprecations, but the list for just one service[1] is pretty terrifying when you consider that your app might depend on two or three dozen services, and a deprecation in just one of them forces you to rewrite perfectly good code. A cursory search reveals a number of reports of being repeatedly bitten by deprecations[2][3][4], so no one should be mislead by the dismissals here. [2] has a good cautionary tale of a forced "upgrade" leading to potentially much greater cost.
I do work at Google: I’m not trying to dismiss the concerns and I understand that deprecations are a legitimate concern and carry a significant business cost. It sucks that you got burned a few years ago, and I totally get the why you lost trust in GCP.
I do think Google Cloud is trying to do better and the few deprecations I’ve seen personally have been heavily scrutinized and considered, with a clear migration path for users. I was only asking for data to objectively understand the problem as it stands today, and not to minimize your own experience. I know there are experiences similar to yours, but hopefully there are far fewer in recent years (but its always hard to tell without data).
There seems to be a general fear about Google potentially killing off a product, based on recent history [1]. Now I know most of these are on the consumer side of things, but you can imagine people's concerns if the same thing started happening to Google Cloud products. Is the GCP team aware of these concerns, (or is this just a HN crowd concern) and if so, are there steps being taken to address this perception head on?
[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/