There is a whole generation of future CTO / VP of Engineering types who are coming up on these reputations for GCP, AWS, Azure, etc. and it'll be interesting to see how the biases play out over the next 5-10 years. I predict a strong move back to self-hosting once the pains of i.e. self-managing a bare metal K8s cluster come down, as well as storage/ram/cpu prices continuing to drop. I for one welcome it.

There is a billion dollar company on the horizon for whoever can best commoditize bare metal with an apple-esque usability model.

Maybe Apple does it? They are good at building apple-esque usability models and are business aligned to sell metal.

> never agree to anything that locks you to Google.

How is Google different from other cloud poviders in terms of vendor lock-in?

Google has a habit of killing off "enterprise" services and applications. Google has a habit of raising prices on services, while I've only ever seen price decreases from AWS and Azure. There is a reason why Azure has seen significantly faster growth than Google, even though both were late entrants to the cloud computing space. It seems that Google is doing their best to shoot themselves in the foot.

I used to recommend GKE as the best way to get started with K8S. With this price change, that advantage is gone. This price change kills off any advantage Google had for getting started in the cloud. Their enterprise-unfriendly habits have already killed off any advantages Google had for established, larger customers of cloud computing.

Google is the most likely to kill off a service you rely on?

AWS _still_ has SimpleDB kicking around. That has been retired as a product for more than 8 years now.

I haven't seen Azure do similar, either, but I haven't paid as much attention to them.

Which Google Cloud service have they killed? This was one of their first services and it's still running: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard

Fair point - yes, I kind of try to avoid it for any provider. But special thing about Google is they are raising prices or worse cancelling or modifying services at will.

For AWS or Azure I developed way more trust over time - could be subjective - but also could be that there is a reason Google is distant 3rd in the game.

Being locked into a provider that does not increase prices or modify services in a non-compatible way ( cancel etc ) works much better than being locked into a provider that does.