Where are you getting this "price hike" narrative for Google from? Google's presence in the cloud market is instrumental in across the board price drops.
[0] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...
> Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform
I have never felt that I have been confused by something so justifiably.
The basic way to tell if something is part of GCP or another Google product that some marketing whiz managed to have "cloud" tacked onto the name is whether or not you need a GCP project to work with it.
Not true, as far as I know. Many (if not all) Google APIs require a GCP project for access via API key, service account credential, or mobile application.
I'll defend many things about the technical quality of GCP and its appropriateness as a viable choice in many cases, but not Google's branding, external PR, or external perception management.
They've always been bad in those areas and that pattern continues.
(Relevant disclosure I've said in other comments: I used to work for Google, including GCP, ending in 2015. I've never worked for Google PR/comms/marketing and I don't work or speak for Google now.)
With Maps, there's suddenly a new price and you have no options.
With our scaled up SCCM environment, SQL alone increased licensing cost by a very significant factor, as you need to license SQL Enterprise when you exceed the core limits of the gratis SQL Standard license.
Your first example: App Engine price hike happened when App Engine departed preview, not after the service had already been intended for mission-critical production use.
Your second example: what they're now calling Google Maps Platform has never been part of Google Cloud Platform, is only relatively recently in a nearby part of the org chart & branding structure (aka Google Cloud which also includes Chrome and Android and G Suite), and has never been subjected to the Google Cloud Platform Deprecation Policy.
Yes, this is a communication failure on Google's part and I'm not blaming the Internet for the common misimpression. But Google's substantive actions in these price changes can be distinguished from how they approach generally available and policy-covered services within GCP, and customers can plan on that basis. (Similarly with G Suite - one should plan differently for core G suite services covered by the G Suite terms and SLA, as compared to other additional Google services that one might use with G Suite.)
But trust in the stability of products can't be siloed that easily.
I think we're mostly or entirely agreeing?
They can make statements about which things have promises and which don't, but it still causes worry until there's a really good track record.
To be clear I'm not pretending that they've shut down as few things as Amazon (looking at you SimpleDB), but within the product area and lifecycle categories I indicated, they've stayed within what is perfectly viable for lots of companies.