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Comment by keypusher | Hacker News Reader

At startups and even medium sized tech companies, these decisions are often driven by engineering/ops teams and not by executives. I was on a team trying to decide between staying with AWS and moving to GCP about a year ago, at a company that spends well over $1M/year on infrastructure. The fact that Google has a track record of abandoning products with active users and has repeatedly shown they do not know how to deal with customers was absolutely part of the reason we decided to stay with AWS. I respect the engineering at Google immensely, and I would be willing to reconsider in a few years, but they need to prove their commitment first. They literally just killed another product today (Android Things)!

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Looks like GCP needs to sorely address this (mis)perception, and ensure their commitments to GCP is separate from the consumer business.

But really, GCP is not the same as the consumer-facing products. GCP already has a lot of clout, and literally nothing I know in GCP has been deprecated/chopped just like that. GCP already has a huge following in its own right and it's very unlikely for GCP stuff to be axed, given how careful they are with implementing new features (I have interacted with numerous engineers, and often feature requests are taken with a lot of valid pushback to prevent feature creep).

I don't think you can fully separate business and customers. Google Maps? Google suddenly vastly increased prices.

This is something all cloud providers suffer from. What assurance do I get that pricing and quality of service remains stable? Amazon has the same problem. If I look into my billing console, I see an increase of used computing resources. From inactive projects. They still managed to use significant CPU-time. I would not be able to claim otherwise. As long as the costs remain low, this is not a problem. But you have to believe your cloud provider...

I wonder how you get all this info about the backends behind cloud services. Nearly everything is a huge blackbox from my perspective. Personally, I deploy solutions to AWS too, mostly beanstalk with defined environments, cognito for user authentication, typical latte macchiato cloud user.

Still using my own server for anything in development or for personal stuff or file storage (have you looked at prices? It is basically free now). I mainly use cloud services because people want it fast and cheap but still need an option to scale the solution.

I am content with the services Amazon delivers, but I heavily expect some kind of bubble burst in the future. Development of infrastructure and management interfaces probably isn't cheap either.

So does Google have a better backend than Amazon or Microsoft? I couldn't tell. Only that Microsoft tends to be slower than the competitors, Google tends to ban random users and some of their own services, and just with that Amazon comes out on top. But the fear that a service is deprecated at one point is a permanent undercurrent.

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