It's very scary to a purchasing manager at a company to know that when they invest $100k+ in developer/consultant time implementing a solution, that every 3-5 years they will need to spend an additional $xk to simply keep the solution alive!
AWS is doing this right. I can't imagine recommending Google for many cloud use cases, given their propensity to decommission software that companies use!
Because you're not running the stack. Relying on any PASS that you can't lock down to a version and deploy on commodity infrastructure means you've accepted the reality of being vulnerable to platform changes - and in a lot of cases this makes sense because the benefits outweigh the cost of staying up to date - but scenarios you describe are not one of them.
I'm amazed that things like SimpleDB are still around and supported even though only a handful of engineers in my ~200 person org have heard of it.
I believe m1 is only available on PV.
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121711
(We were well aware of this thread, and others like it, internally)
Something that exists, but has absolutely no investment and unknown support is probably not a great thing. Given that EC2's recent outage was because they hadn't restarted their services in a long time[1], what problems exist here? I think that Google probably should have a SUPER long deprecation policy (24 months feels right), but a year isn't terrible - and I'd rather explicitly get a statement like this than the zombie services elsewhere.
Disclosure: I used to work at AMZN and am highly biased.
I am so sick of companies thinking "a year (or even two!) to migrate is long enough for anyone": do you realize how many services I use? Do you realize how many random products I have built? If every service deprecates their API once every five years and gives everyone two years to update, and you use 20 services (this is common!), that means that every few months you are having to go back through all of your projects you have ever built to rewrite them against some new API. That is absolutely insane.
On a meta level, I've seen an incredibly high number of risk averse companies just using EC2/S3 or GCE/GCS. That's not to say I disagree with using tons of services (that's how you get value!), but it's clearly food for thought.
I'd love to see historical data on the various cloud service turndowns, though I suspect there's too little track record to draw meaningful conclusions (and for some folks, abandonware is just as bad as turndown).
[Edit for disclosure since I wasn't in this thread before]
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.