We have stuff that must stay on AWS, too dangerous to make a move now :(
We'll ignore the "switch to auto scaling" bit. Teammates have already started testing CoreOS & Kubernetes (on AWS) while I was writing the article. We'll figure it out and get it in production soon, hopefully.
We have a subsidiary which has no locking on AWS and could use an infra refreshing. They already have google accounts and use one or two products. They'll be moved to GCE in the coming months, hopefully.
Why drop autoscaling though? Note that you can use Autoscaling Groups with Kubernetes on EC2: https://github.com/kubernetes/contrib/blob/master/cluster-au... and the team would happily take bug reports (either as GH Issues or just yelling at them on slack/IRC).
(Sadly http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/aws/ doesn't point to this...)
I suppose that auto scaling will be back on the table later, to auto scale kubernetes instances. Maybe.
As others (including downthread) have pointed out, Google definitely has a bad overall support reputation, but that's because nearly every (traditional) Google service is free and lacks this structured support model. Just like Cloud, if you're even a moderately large Ads customer, you get pretty good support!
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and want your business ;).
One thing often not considered ("Why not just have someone keep it running?") is that you really have to keep a team of people on it (in case there's a CVE or something) or at least familiar enough with the code to fix it. There's also the double standard of "you haven't added new features in forever!" (Maybe this wouldn't have applied to Reader though).
But, I agree if we could have kept it on life support somehow, we wouldn't have (as many) people asking "What if they shut down Cloud?!?". Conveniently, as people get a sense of how serious Google Cloud is about this business, even on HN I'm seeing this less.
tl;dr it makes money, will make a lot more, they're going to support it.
For what it's worth, I agree with you that a lot of the value of Container Engine comes from having a team ensure the bits all work together. That should be (one of) the positives of any managed service, but I think the Container Engine team has done a particularly good job in a fast moving and often bumpy space.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud ;).