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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

The clock is ticking for Google Cloud.

The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.

That should give any Enterprise thinking about going all in on GCP a warm and fuzzy.

When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.

On the other hand, while new accounts can’t access some AWS deprecated services, they still support features like EC2 classic years after they had a better offering.

Microsoft is also well known for supporting offerings for years.

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>When I say how can you trust Google for your infrastructure seeing how they abandon projects, the usual response I get is that they would never do that with their “Enterprise” offerings.

And that's when I talk about Google Enterprise Search.

And the order of magnitude price increase of the maps API.

I can’t verify it, but I’ve heard it repeated plenty of times that AWS has never raised the price of an offering.

Almost seems like it would have people looking for the eject button.

Man my firm was looking into going ahead GCP and now this

Aren't you feeling lucky that they are doing all your due diligence work for you? I wish my decisions were this easy!

Its kind of ridiculous that this is the moment in time they decided to pull the plug. It feels like they leaked this to ensure they could get out of cloud by 2024.

GCP cloud skills/certs have just started becoming marketable. Only recently has GCP become something you can seriously suggest to managers and point to BigQuery, Stack driver, firebase and cloud run as reasons to switch. Cloud Run, dialogflow, bigquery and kubernetes engine are literally at the bleeding edge of where the industry is going and Cloud Dataflow is seeing adoption among lots of companies tired of running their own clusters.

It really seems like they leaked this to ensure they couldnt compete with AWS and Azure so they can jump ship in 2023.

And you’re kind of demonstrating why enterprises don’t take GCP seriously.

How is their enterprise support? The decision makers would hear everything you say and you might as well be speaking Greek.

The one CYA question they are going to ask is where does GCP fall on the Magic Quadrant? If things go wrong with GCP they will have to explain why they chose it.

You wouldnt mention jaeger or istio either to decision makers.

You would say we can cut operational costs and modernize big data infrastructure while making our data warehouse more accessible(BigQuery). We can save money when APIs arent being used (Cloud Run). We can process real time data without increasing operational costs (Cloud Dataflow). We can debug systems failures faster (Stackdriver). We can launch products and iterate faster with a lightweight frontend team (Firebase). We can build conversational interfaces rapidly (Dialogflow).

You reword in terms of results rather than tools for decision makers. Of course this is all moot because you have to convince them google cloud wont shut down by 2023.

Most major decisions aren’t made by what is cheaper - it’s made by which is safer.

Making operations google’s problem is precisely what drives BigQuery, FaaS and Dataflow adoption. Its operationally safer when you dont need a hadoop team to maintain your data infrastructure.

See Nytimes, Twitter and Spotify for examples.

Now if you’re talking about future-safety there was an argument...until a few hours ago.

Again, you’re talking about what’s “operationally safer” not what’s “reputationally safer”. If AWS goes down, no one is going to question your decision - and you’re in the same boat as a lot of other people. If GCP goes down and everyone else is up, people are going to ask a million question.

Every company you named isn’t the same thing as just arguing to the powers that be - AWS is what Netflix uses. AWS has many more “referencable clients” that matter.

We're fully adopted and couldn't be bigger fans. After about 2014 I feel like AWS just got into a "how many services can we launch" game but most (if not all) of them have poor reliability and poor docs. Google has fewer options, but what they ship works as advertised.

I agree the cloud (pun intended) of doubt is unsettling when you're considering a switch, but I'd consider risking it anyway. They do have a tendency to kill projects, but killing a capital investment of this size is a bigger pill to swallow than not supporting xyz software anymore. So even if they do exit, I imagine it would wind down slowly.

My impression is that that has already happened... at multiple levels in the company.

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