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Comment by thesoonerdev | Hacker News Reader

By far, the most common complaints I have heard when researching about GCP online are the following: 1) You cannot use SQL in the same way other platforms allow you 2) Only a subset of language features are supported for Java and Python and it is a little hard to know when you will run into that issue 3) As a combination of 1 and 2, it is not easy to migrate out of GCP and this makes it a kind of vendor lock in.

While many people seem to agree that the platform itself works very well, if you are developing on GCP, free credits or not, doesn't this mean you are knowingly getting into a platform that will be hard to leave?

Can someone who has worked with GCP address if these concerns are still ongoing? Also, are there some positives which are not easy to see from the outside which might have helped you choose them/stick with them?

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> 1) You cannot use SQL in the same way other platforms allow you

Are you talking about Postgres support? Because they also announced that today. Or are you talking about something else?

> 2) Only a subset of language features are supported for Java and Python

The new "App Engine Flexible Environment" seems to support most things, including Python 3 and libraries with C extensions. Are you perhaps talking about the old App Engine environment?

Google is competing against Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. All theee cloud platforms have some degree of lock-in, true enough, but all three platforms also provide APIs and services th make building systems easier.

That's for cloud platform, cloud compute gives you a real vm.

> That's for cloud platform

You mean App Engine?

So these limitations are only in Google App Engine? Is there a reason people choose to use the App Engine then?

Those limitations apply to the old model of App Engine they call the Standard Environment, which abstracted much more over the underlying resources (you didn't have to think about what VMs you were using).

At some point they realised that maintaining their own parallel forks of the runtimes was a loser's game and now gently push you toward the "Flexible Environment", which maps more transparently onto GCE (their equivalent to EC2) instances (which is better for them since you're billed much more directly according to your resource use), and has much more up to date runtimes, and you can supply your own docker image if none of them fit.

The only people I know of who actively use the Standard Env anymore for new projects are trying to have a hobby project run for free in the free tier.

It's cheaper and you don't have to manage a servers. That makes some devs very happy.

You don't have to manage servers operations at all, just write your own server application. If you're testing proof of concept or have a hobby application, it's incredibly useful.

Yeah names get confusing now

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