However the argument against using GCP has already been stated in this thread multiple times.
- Will it exist in 3-5 years. Google has a reputation for a reason.
- Will the cost increase in the next year. Google (including google cloud) has a reputation for a reason.
- Here we have seen time and time again problems reaching support with Google Cloud.
Meanwhile my personal AWS account that I spend maybe $5 a month on... I emailed support about a billing problem and got a response about a day later.
I would not risk my job by using Google Cloud and being at the whims of Google being Google. The last thing I want is to have to go to my leadership and explain why the cost is going up or why suddenly we need to spend a bunch of engineering effort because google is discontinuing something.
If I really didn't want to support AWS/Amazon (which is fair) I would go Azure long before going GCloud. Hell I might be convinced to go IBM but thankfully I don't have to make that decision with Azure.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all launched roughly as many products in the last couple of decades, and killed roughly as many of them unceremoniously after the products failed. (Amazon execs used to outright brag to the media about how many products they killed, since it showed that they were daring to take risks.)
AWS, Azure and GCP have also all launched roughly the same product portfolios, and each of them killed basically none of those products.
Amazon supports most stuff roughly forever.
By the way, how's the Fire Phone holding up for you these days? I assume it's still working well and powerful enough to do your web searches on a9.com, and read sites like the Amapedia and DPReviews. Do you happen to know how many of the Alexa.com top500 sites it can browse, or do you need to ask on Amazon Askville? But I know it won't be able to play Amazon's hit game Crucible, that's a PC game!
If you need to play some tunes on your Amazon Tap speaker and don't have them on the phone, all your mp3s are right there on Amazon Music Storage, just where you left them with the Amazon Music Importer to be played with the Amazon Cloud Player. And the files are safely backed up on Amazon Drive just in case! It's the same thing with all the digital movies you bought on Amazon Unbox, they'll just be waiting in the cloud for you to download them. (Watching DVDs rented from LoveFilm is just so yesterday.) [0]
And let's not forget Amazon's initial core competency of retail!
Just use your Dash Button to order some more books from Book Depository, it'd be a bother to have to go to one of the physical Amazon Books stores. It's just crazy how much stuff you can buy online these days! Shoes from endless.com, food delivered straight to your doorstep by Amazon Restaurants, concert tickets from Amazon Tickets, flash fashion from MyHabit.com, hotel bookings from Amazon Destinations, and all kinds of daily necessities for the family from places like diapers.com and soap.com. And don't worry, if you're bored of these normal online stores (like those set up with Amazon Webstore) and want a different experience, there's always Amazon Spark or Amazon Light for fresh takes on shopping! And for the really rare stuff, there's a good chance that there's some listings on Amazon Auction. Really, the only time I have to deal with local businesses is when I get one of those amazing group deals from Amazon Local (the code for that can surely be stored in Amazon Wallet).
I wonder what the right way to pay in one of those local stores is though... Will they take Amazon WebPay, or will I need to have my credit card scanned by one of those Amazon Local Register payment terminals?
But let's not think that it's all about consumption. I'm actually working on a screenplay myself, using Amazon Storywriter! Once I get it printed using BookSurge, it'll look professional af.
KILL IT. It’s a feature depended on by tons and tons of customers, that was a far bigger shock for me than google domains, atleast domain infra is designed with migration in mind usually (dns not included)
But google killing of a vital feature[1] of firebase (with no google alternative provided) made me shit scared on if I should integrate with more of their products.
They also randomly jacked up prices of sms authentication exponentially in a day without any major notice and caused a ton of people to get thousands of dollars in bill increase suddenly [2].
Stay away from google is a good idea unless playing russian roulette at work is your hobby.
Every product there is one manager’s ambition for promotion away from being killed and re-invented
- [1] (https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links)
- [2] (https://www.reddit.com/r/Firebase/comments/14cj7au/firebase_...)
We are talking about the Cloud.
In fact, if you read just a few posts up, you'll see that in my first message I made the exact point about how Amazon!=AWS just like Google!=GCP. And the rebuttal was that Amazon actually rarely kills products. That's what I was replying to.
If you want to say that Amazon's track record is irrelevant to AWS, just be consistent and apply the same reasoning to Azure and GCP.
Google has demonstrated a culture of killing off services. https://www.thestack.technology/google-cloud-iot-core-retire...
Amazon, on the consumer side has many canceled products. On the AWS side they have demonstrated a commitment to keeping old services alive.
So on a surface level, your analysis holds up. But where Amazon has earned some goodwill by supporting even barely used services, Google has not.
Perhaps they will given time, as GCP is fairly new. But when you are talking tens of millions of dollars in spend, reputation matters.
They'd also periodically reach out to offer free consulting services that would cut our monthly bill. They were upfront about the motivation: they wanted us to integrate more of their services. The upside for us was that we could get better, cheaper service. If you're planning on sticking with them anyway, that's a very attractive offer.
Meanwhile, the support venue for our enterprise Google Workspace account was a mutual support web forum as far as I could tell.
Unless you've experienced both, it's hard to believe how radically differently the 2 companies handle customer support.
A previous client was all-in on GCP. They were not a huge operation and in fact were slowly migrating on-prem stuff to it. GCP support was pretty good. The account manager was always on point and whenever we needed we could have an actual engineer or two on a call with us to troubleshoot stuff and give us advice and general support.
Of course, for less urgent and less severe issues it would generally be done over the course of a couple days to a week in support ticket messages / email but that was perfectly fine.
I've been back to using AWS for a little while now and I miss how much simpler it is to set up things in GCP. Even IAM which I remember bitching about so much during those days, now I just miss how much simpler it was and I didn't realise.
Also if you need Kubernetes, no other offering compares to GKE.
Confidence that it will continue to exist in the next 3-10 years?
Fun read:
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
Name the odds and condition you think gcp will violate.
Odds? Nobody's a fortune teller, but it was still being subsidized by ads with 3B loss in its FY22[0 p. 70], only increasing 100M in profit despite cloud revenue growing from 19B to 26B overall [0 p. 66]. They're either going to need to increase costs or add more "killer" products with large margins if they want to become profitable.
0: https://abc.xyz/assets/d4/4f/a48b94d548d0b2fdc029a95e8c63/20...
People keep saying things will be shut down and I think they should put their money where their mouth is.
You seem very intense about Google's offering, maybe you feel attacked by the points made in the thread, but the way you're approaching this discussion is very strange.
I really do not think the chance of GCP discontinuing a core service is high enough to warrant the level of comments this gets and if I find myself constantly reading these comments, maybe I can at least be compensated by people making bad bets or maybe people will admit the chance is really low.
So if you are so worried about this, please give me a number that represents how worried you are about this.
I don't think discontinuing cloud iot provides any indication that compute engine is going away.
AFAICT cloud iot core was hosted mqtt, which is a thing others offer and you can transition relatively easily. I don't think the shutdown of it was catastrophic for any companies; the quotes I saw in articles were of the sort "yeah, that's annoying, but it shouldn't be hard to migrate to something else".
Are you interested in making a bet on the chance GCP will be discontinued?
And lets be clear, this is not a catastrophic risk; your contract with GCP guarantees they will not discontinue services without 12 months of notice so you will have time to do an orderly migration unless Alphabet itself goes under.
I am a GCP user; I have found their offering (actually having GPU quota) significantly better than the other clouds and GCP shutting down does not keep me up at all.
12 months is the time for the contracts to settle between these enterprises and cloud-vendors.
If you work at a company that can't do a cloud infra migration in 36 months, I don't have any good advice for you, but I doubt most commenters on here fall into that bucket. Frankly, I would expect companies that large to be in all the clouds so that you could negotiate them against each other, but I doubt that impacts many people here, and the chance of any of these worst case scenarios happening is vanishingly small.
Some companies even need to check with the laws they reside in if the new cloud vendor can even be used.
Just work in any financial, medical, pharmaceutical, government-related... company and you'll understand that a year is nothing for these companies.
Whether or not they'll continue to lose billions a year for Google I can't say.
You get that on AWS, too. The difference in my experience has been that once you’re out of a narrow range of features you’re more likely to hit something which is builtin on AWS but has a GCP ticket from 5 years ago with no progress. If you have any kind of security compliance requirements that gets brutal on GCP since you have to take on running an entire service to get that one missing feature.
AWS IAM is much better than GCP, or was 3 years ago. If you are in an industry where fine-tuned RBAC per service is a thing you want, it's better to go AWS, all things equal.
Also, GCP reps suck compared to AWS in terms of responsiveness and general give-a-shits. Hearsay.
But all that aside, AWS is better. It's much more predictable which things will work together from the documentation, the support is better and the IAM is better on paper, if you actually have that unicorn platform/infrastructure team.
You can share resources across AWS accounts. I don't know for easy that is on gcp, but it didn't seem crazy on Amazon.