Exactly. According to what you said, any service with that policy could literally shut down next year if there is a deprecation announcement this year.

Which is better than some small no name startup service provider who might just go out of business tomorrow, but among all the big cloud providers Google is definitely the hardest to trust with longevity.

A more realistic concern is that Google might substantially change the free tier making this more expensive, or might shut down some auxiliary product that would be painful to switch from without migrating clouds completely, or that a payment might bounce for some reason and now I’m locked out of all of my google services without recourse.

Sure the odds of all of the above are relatively low, but from what I’ve seen they are a lot higher on Google than they are on Azure or AWS.

That 12 months is the minimum guaranteed period that your service won't be interrupted.

See the full list of deprecations in App Engine: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations/

High profile deprecations are handled carefully and we usually handle them with extended deprecation period with clear migration path/doc and communications. Notable examples in the table:

1. Python 2.5: 4+ years 2. Java 6: 20 months with existing user automigrate to Java 7 3. Java 7: 13 months with existing user automigrate to Java 8 4. Master/slave datastore: 3+ years.

Considering App Engine is the first Google Cloud offering, I'd say we have a very good track record of meet our deprecation policy and usually exceeds it.