Gergely Orosz: on the risk of Google shutting down Google Cloud Platform
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AWS SimpleDB has been a dead product for years now. Afaik, nobody is developing it, nobody is advertising it, and I believe it's not been launched in any new regions in ages. Even internally, when I worked there, it was not a product you should use for anything.
Yet it's still supported. Customers are still using it. Somewhere, there is a team in AWS keeping the lights on.
Because AWS knows that customer trust is more valuable than whatever it costs to keep that product alive.
Google does not understand that.
While fine for a customer tech ecosystem facing security threats, it’s really not ideal for enterprise offerings.
Seeing how those sorts of things play out in actuality, it doesn't surprise me that unpopular or unprofitable products are killed rather than kept on life support. Lots of times, the people who would have to fight for them don't have the political will (or maybe even complete history of the product) to commit to staff allocation to keep them alive in the face of the alternative: chasing the next 10x dream.
Although depot migrations are tedious, the burden of doing them for all but a subset of mothballed systems would not significantly changed my life.
Off the top of my head I can only think of one time when an internal library deprecation caused a huge ruckus: some front-end framework was deprecated which led to a huge push to rewrite many of Google's internal websites.
When I left even BigTable, MapReduce and other services are still supported even though they have been deprecated and their replacements (Spanner, Flume) had been GA for more than a decade. (Although their API calls may just go through a translation layer, not sure.)
If anything the CI/CD infra backing Google development keeps these services running longer than they would otherwise.
if you just mean "you don't have to merge everything from live, you can just merge select packages, or build specific updates in manually" then yes that is true, but you won't have a fun time doing it for very long.
Everyone in the Valley thinks they are awesome because Google does it and a Stanford grad is obsessed with cross project atomic commits.
Keep going and Amazon is gong to bury Google cloud permanently.
My experience with Facebook was that Mercurial was awesome, but the multiple monorepos were unbearably slow.
Both are extreme - just on different ends.
AWS should at least remove it from the product page etc so people don't fall into the trap of using it.
Microsoft and Oracle are both well known for extremely long term support and creating easy migration paths.
I would only ever use GCP as an offsite backup or use some of their AI tools as part of toolchain that either operates on a copy of the data or lands its output on another cloud.
In other words I would always make sure to design in a way where I could exit Google in 30 days or less.
That's a fair callout. But also they provided a one year migration timeline, let you keep using it if you already were, and gave you tools to easily migrate what you had left.
So I'd say if anything they increased trust by showing how to do it right.
And arguably that's a feature, not a product.
They are only available on older regions however.
Paravirt AMIs do and will keep working for a very long time to come.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549
EC2 Classic networking support
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-her...
Disclaimer: I work at AWS ProServe.
But the point is, they hired people like you just to help people like me move to the newer better product that replaced all the functionality and then some. We didn't have to suddenly figure out a way to replace core functionality.
AWS is designed to be very flexible and configurable (example: look at IAM). The tradeof is the complexity and amount of work required to set up even the most frequently used services (such as ECS Fargate or Lambda).
That being said, if somebody is looking for a simple, developer-first experience, and wants to use AWS (and have all of its power/flexibility), have a look at https://stacktape.com (I'm a founder).
The best I can think is that maybe Google did that analysis and found that all the customers for Google Domains were high maintenance novice users so it made sense to sell it off to a business designed to support them?
SquareSpace is a reseller of Google Workspace (for people who use SquareSpace for their company homepage), and will not only be taking over the domains, but for those who bought Workspace within Domains, they will become their new reseller.
That's terrible. Not every domain is on GCP Cloud domains and falls back to Google domains by default. It's quite obvious even as a user.
Google has had a big problem for over a decade with having multiple overlapping products, leading to wasted effort and customer confusion. It also leads to a bunch of extra work when one product is rolled into another or shut down.
It's unclear to me why they didn't migrate everyone over to GCP Cloud Domains. I'm also not sure that most customers really care if they're using Google Domains vs another registrar vs GCP Cloud Domains.
Doesn't that require a GCP account? There are a lot of minimally-technical users who would be very confused going into a big cloud console, dealing with projects and IAM and all that stuff, just to renew their domain. They will have no trouble dealing with Squarespace.
(I'm a xoogler, worked in cloud and launched actual products in it, and I strongly prefer AWS. I still don't think Cloud- specifically, GCE and GCS- will go away but I do expect them to continue trimming all the "barely profitable" services)
That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. It would be much better in the long term to have Cloud separate; not as good as if Search & Ads were separate but I don't think that's really viable without enormous costs and much difficulty.
TI was absolutely enormous and it was key to google's early and continued scaling of compute and storage. I don't know if it still exists within Google or got renamed, or what.
But some of these moves have me a bit nervous having built on top of Firebase.
I’m asking, because I am genuinely interested in using Firebase for prototyping, RAD, and whatnot - but I don’t want to put all my eggs into one basket, especially not a basket that I can’t defenestrate.
* 2005: Google became a domain name registrar.
* 2015: Google Domains was publicly launched under a beta test mode.
* March 2022: Google announced that Google Domains was officially out of beta.
* June 2023: Squarespace concluded an agreement to purchase the Google Domains business.
Exiting beta in 2022 after seven years suggests Google planned to get serious about Google Domains. What happened between 2022 and 2023 that made them decide to kill it? I guess when a hobby becomes a business, the bar to keep it going is a lot higher.
Eventually Google Cloud will die and Azure will buy it for a song. It may take 10 years but it's going to happen.
Nitter link for the lazy twitter hater.
I can totally see how CIOs and other tech savvy leaders in business really look at anything they use Google related and wonder to themselves if it might be wise to look at alternatives.
I agree with lot of comments in that Twitter thread.
It's kind of shocking to me but I was internally debating whether I should spend my time learning how to develop on top of Bard or OpenAI and the whole thought process was around unreliability of Google to support the platform. Just think for a second about that, the 20-year well established software giant vs startup from 2 years ago and all the negative was on Google's side in that equation.
Bad customer service was in googles DNA from day one.
of course then complexity hit, and the paranoia of fake ad impressions ate the whole company.
Ballmer cared and tried. Might have failed, but didn't seem like he was out of touch.
Google has had a solid reputation for canning services people use and like, and disabling API access to things, ever since I can remember. Perhaps pre-IPO they had the reputation you suggest. Memory fades..
It really is incredible no one has ever questioned his responsibility for the complete destruction of developer trust in Google.
And without developer trust, nothing with an API can ever succeed.
> Turns out that even though I used an @gmail.com address to register the domain, every single email from Google Domains was being flagged as spam. So Google’s own email service considers all emails from Google’s own domain name service to be spam.
Hoping Cloudflare move faster on .dev and .app so I can migrate before the inevitable fuckups happen with the transition to Squarespace.
Likely the total transition will take over a year to complete. You will probably get a notification a few months after the transfer of control that the registrar name is changing and you dont need to do anything but make sure your contact info is up to date. At some point, probably 2-3 years down the line, domains.google will cease redirecting to SquareSpace domains.
Where do I flee to from here? Protonmail? Office365?
I'm willing to spend $5-$10/mo per user. Apps would be nice but mail is critical. I'll miss Google's spam filtering but so be it.
I know Workspace isn't dead yet but I'm not going to wait until it is. I'm done. My DNS has always been somewhere else which will make this a lot easier.
BTW I have to deal with Google Cloud as a “partner” and they’re a major pain in the ass - everything we do is mandated as custom, we have to come to them, etc - compared with their competitors who actually feel like partners. We’re always one Google reorg away from throwing away our efforts to be replaced with another goat rodeo.
Higher chance of it being sold off to a rich SAAS wanting to get in like a Salesforce type.
IBM started by buying Softlayer and other clouds so yes no chance.
The opposite of Apple who people who pays for things is his cash cow and they take care much more on that.
And what get Google's brand with only being good with ads? Love from advertisers and skepticism by consumers.
It's served me well. I've seen so many businesses torched to the ground by doing business with Google.
That's not an indictment of Google. There are things specific companies are good for and bad for. Google is bad at any sort of B2B, partnerships, or similar.
It will shut down Google Cloud.
All that will remain is Google search/ads.
The AI opportunity has already been fumbled and will soon be completely dropped.
And Sundar Pichai, who has destroyed everything except googles advertising cash firehose, will stay there and continue to run the empty shell of googles potential.
And like now, no-one will care.
I'll never trust Google cloud with any production infra.
Reminds me of an episode long ago when I worked in hardware design: someone in biz planning completed their MBA and made a spreadsheet ranking all our SKUs by profitability. They recommended shit-canning several products, including the custom cables required to plug in our most profitable product.
It’s much more based on “which decision will shut that guy on the board up and not destroy the company”
Larry and Sergey are _gone_. They are wholly uninvolved.
If a board member is google hostile and asks questions about it all the time, there is pressure to switch away from GCP just to get the board to stop asking the question.
Similar things were seen when companies all announced blockchain strategies so they could report to the board that they’re on top of it.
It's not just board pressure that led people go for Blockchain crap - it was the craze to find the next Bitcoin-style unicorn. Blockchain everything and hope it's your tokens which explode 10.000x in value.
> Just to be clear: this is not just the consumer product (with no Google Cloud connection) going away. Google Cloud Domains is deprecated and discontinued as part of this sale / shutdown.
> Google told employees internally: but not it’s customers. Yet.
The reason I'm waiting is that if/when Google confirms Cloud DNS (the nameserver functionality) is going away I can have a more productive discussion with my google cloud rep once things are announced officially.
How has there been so little and incomplete communication from Google about this?