That is true. And, as Spotify found out, what Spotify does can also happen in its own Data Centers :)

Google does give an additional level of comfort - seamless scaling, No-Ops, powerful Big Data tools, flexibility.

I'm going to shamelessly promote one of my opinions on this topic when it comes to BigQuery:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/visualizing-t...

> Google does give an additional level of comfort - seamless scaling, No-Ops, powerful Big Data tools, flexibility.

I'm going to bookmark this comment and come back to it when Google decides its getting out of the "cloud" compute business.

As someone who's been on Google Cloud for 2.5 years now and has seen the growth and the transformation firsthand, I welcome this bet.

Hmm, sounds interesting.

Why do you think they will do so?

Its not their core business. Google constantly exits businesses unless they explode in profitability. As someone who currently uses AWS, it would take an act of god for me to move over to Google Cloud, even if the tools were better and even with the cost of some services (nearline storage) cheaper than AWS.

I'm not just paying for a service. I'm paying because I know AWS is in it for the long haul.

This is great for Spotify, just as AWS was great for Netflix (considering both services are terrible at representing true workloads; they're both just control planes serving static content, videos or music). I don't see it dragging a ton of business into Google, just making their acquisitions easier for people who decide to start on GCP or migrate in.

Just my two cents.

> Its not their core business.

Its the heart of their core competency. Its not their principal mechanism for monetizing that, though outside of the core advertising business its also an avenue that they seem to have made one of the most significant, longest push to make a route to monetization, even in the presence of large, dedicated competitors (behind Apps for Work.)

Obviously, any insufficiently profitable business from any vendor will eventually be closed down, either voluntarily or by business failure, but Google Cloud Platform doesn't seem like a particularly likely candidate for closure on any timescale on which any existing cloud platform would be reliable.

> Its the heart of their core competency.

For "Google Scale" computing tasks. Not someone with tens or hundreds of virtual machines.

Would you have said the same thing about Amazon when they started AWS? "Data centers aren't their core business: retail is".

Yes. But, Amazon is known for their customer service, even in the AWS space. Google is not.

If Google wants to succeed in certain spaces, they need to commit to them for a duration, and evangelize them. I don't see them doing that anywhere as well as Amazon does with AWS.

Are they known for the customer service with AWS?

Anyways both companies provide SLAs, phone and email support, and consultation for a price.

AWS doesn't have AppEngine or the Datastore. Yes, there is similar products, but they are absolutely not 'the same'.

Is datastore tied to appengine? some parts of the docs say "datastore is for appengine" and other parts don't mention appengine at all.

It used to be but not anymore; you can use it separately now.