It's heaps and heaps better than Azure.

You'll be fine. We run a number of AKS clusters and they have all been rock solid. I think the problem is people hear "managed cluster" and so they don't think they need to understand how k8s works. Follow best practices (resource limits, etc.) and you'll be just fine. We've even tested out the upgrade flow on a live production cluster and it was butter smooth.

Why? GKE works perfectly over there.

Many people (me included) don't trust Google to stay with any business besides advertising. There's been too many times that they have ended services with not much time to get off.

That and countless horror stories about once your google account or service is banned for whatever reason detected by their bot, you have no way to appeal with their nonexistent customer support.

The Cloud products follow a Deprecation Policy documented here: https://cloud.google.com/terms/

I can understand being upset about their consumer products but it doesn’t really apply here.

This is what always puzzled me about the Google-Alphabet strategy, specifically the idea of having all the assets under a single share ticker (GOOGL).

The more services you put under one banner, the more the stink of one disaster is going to linger, and hinder adoption of the successes.

To me, a far simpler proposition would be a new brand & share issuance for each new sub-company (eg. Waymo), with existing Alphabet shareholders getting pro-rata shares in the new company.

I’d bet on it being about the recognition that Google has been a pioneer and thought leader in the scalable systems/hosting space and they didn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.