The standard "lol google will kill it in 6 months anyway" troll doesn't really apply to Google Cloud services. They know better than to be fickle with infrastructure offerings.
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.
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.
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.)
It might not, but doing it so much for other services destroys trust across the entire brand.