It's not in bad taste, despite other comments saying otherwise. We need to recognize that competition is good, and Amazon isn't the answer to everything.
I think there is little GCP does better than AWS. Pricing is better on paper, but performance per buck seems to be on par. Stability is a lot worse on GCP, and I don't just mean service outages like this one (which they had their fair share) but also individual issues like instances slowing down or network acting up randomly. Also lack of service offerings like no PostgreSQL, functions never leaving alpha, no hosted redis clusters etc... Support is also too expensive compared to AWS.
Management interfaces are better on GCP and sustained use discount is a big step up against AWS reservations. Otherwise, I think AWS works better.
Other services are a different story - from my perspective Google are better at supporting legacy interfaces than most.
> We are writing to inform you that we are winding down sales and renewals of Google Site Search (GSS). Starting April 1st, 2017, new purchases and renewals of GSS will not be available.
Site Search seems like an infra offering to me.
Not an expert by any means but I would put more weight to Google's ONE year promise over (to give an example) HPE's twenty years promise. I know it is a cheap shot because I am pretty sure HPE will be bought and sold at least once in the next twenty years.
We were users of the Google Mini Search appliance, went to a 3rd party in-house installed search solution that we did not like and then a year ago went to GSS. We are looking again for something suitable. The best part of the Google Site Search was search fidelity.
It might not, but doing it so much for other services destroys trust across the entire brand.
Most notably, I know many people who run these types of sites and outside of GAE being mediocre, I've never heard them complain about anything like that.
I.e., some douchebag who has no interest or stake in what you do has just dumped a potentially substantial amount of technical debt into your product backlog and, quite possibly, prioritised it all the way to the top.
As somebody else noted above: I don't need people creating more work from me. I can do that quite well enough on my own, thanks very much, and for side-projects this kind of chopping and changing is a pain in the ass.
By definition, with side-projects time is limited, so you absolutely have to focus on the most valuable activities to the exclusion of all else. For this reason, I only consider AWS and Azure for my projects: Google are just too fickle. Lucky you, if you have the time to deal with their nonsense.
(Btw, I'm not dissing Google on a technical level - they obviously do great, interesting work, and they're certainly one of the pioneers of PaaS. I just don't need the hassle of having to fix stuff because they keep killing APIs, projects, services.)
Just last week I got an email saying that they'd discovered an issue on Google Cloud Datastore where certain (strongly consistent!) queries could have been returning incorrect results for a week long period and that I should check my logs to see if anything important had been affected in my application.
That's not the sort of behaviour that inspires confidence in a service.
This whole idea of being angry at a vendor for deprecating something with 1yr notice is just ridiculous!
People need to realize they are choosing lock-in, and are choosing the risk of deprecation every time they decide to use a cloud service with no drop in competition/open source/etc.
Own your choices people, don't blame others...
The expectation of stability beyond a year is certainly not unreasonable when you're asking people to build their businesses/infrastructure on your platform.
And, building redundancy across providers can be impractical, owed to learning curve, cost duplication, higher outbound bandwidth costs, effort duplication, solution complexity, etc.
Then, about a year or two ago - humans actually started responding to and fixing problems. A welcome change!
And good luck getting accurate documentation.
I used to work on the Azure Portal Team. As much negative things as I can say about Microsoft, they take making things just work for developers seriously, despite high prices and misc. service issues.
The since nixed compute container project I initially worked on really exemplified this.
I tend to use Colo or AWS when possible but I have a client that insisted on Google GCE and Endpoints.
I've spent so much time time digging through source code and working around broken dev tooling, and dealing with incorrect or out of date documentation thanks to that requirement.
In my personal opinion Google has a way to go in mature tooling. Silent failures, or worse failures that don't result in build failures are not acceptable. Requiring paid support contracts to resolve an issue in google infra is not acceptable. Incredibly poor support for local dev environments is not acceptable.
After dealing with this stuff, I find it unlikely that I will ever rely on their systems in the future. AWS/Colo or, with reservations, Azure all the way.
Twice the persistence means always having at least one backup and thus the occurance of downtime reduces not up
I suspect though that most people affected deemed the risks and costs of failure low enough to be acceptable, and for many people it still is - even with this outage. But that's a conscious decision, rather than plain ignorance.
Sounds like it basically coincides with Diane Greene coming on board to run the show -- which is great news for all of us with increased competition on not just the technical front but also support (which is often the deal maker/breaker)
I was at a talk last year, where she spoke, and as much as I love Google, it was one of the boat boring talks I've ever heard in my life. So monotone and uninteresting... and I'm probably one of the biggest Google fans out there.
Look at Safra Catz's public speaking (Oracle). Terrible public speaker, terrific operator [1].
[1] though we may easily disagree with their business practices.
https://medium.com/@jim_dowling/reflections-on-s3s-architect...