It’s actually double lock-in, so 2x worse.
You used to have to just be afraid of lock-in, which I don’t think is as big an issue as it sometimes seems.
But with Google, you’re not only locked in but might be LOCKED OUT when they kill your product.
You used to have to just be afraid of lock-in, which I don’t think is as big an issue as it sometimes seems.
But with Google, you’re not only locked in but might be LOCKED OUT when they kill your product.
If google starts killing their cloud products, I will eat my socks. Just let me wash them first.
7.1 Discontinuance of Services. Subject to Section 7.2, Google may discontinue any Services or any portion or feature for any reason at any time without liability to Customer.
7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate those Services versions and features identified at https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment)
So technically they can do it, though their enterprise customers likely have stronger agreements that require at least X time (probably 1 year) notice
Look, I hate a lot of what Google stands for and where it’s going. But I find it very implausible they’ll kill any non-beta products that are part of google cloud platform. GCP is poised to take the place of AdWords as the google golden goose, helping them to diversify from their heavy reliance on advertising for revenue. They do not want to screw that up.
I’m sure they are well aware of the uprising that would cause amongst developers, aka the core customers of GCP. It would be a stupid move in a highly competitive cloud market, effectively telegraphing the fact that you can not rely on GCP services to exist in perpetuity. Their competitors would likely respond by re-implementing the shut down product with a compatible API so they could literally steal disgruntled users from GCP.
If you’re really concerned about this, the solution is pretty simple: don’t use GCP. If you want to use it, then only rely on the very core services that google clearly has strong incentives not to kill. Those would likely be VMs and any products that have an equivalent at another cloud vendor.
Google has a habit of killing things, no matter if you pay for it and your business relies on it, or not.
Many of their cloud APIs are also acquisitions. The entire Firebase product line, and the Fabric.io product line are acquisitions.
Should we expect those to also disappear suddenly?
I get the gist of the OP's complaint, but like you said, that behavior pattern is just not tenable in the kind of operating environment Google Cloud finds itself in these days.
Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud, but not on any of the aforementioned products.