Of course, the downside to doing anything with a Google product is that it could be deprecated next year...
When will everyone understand that google cloud (money earning product) is different to all the other free products
When Google demonstrates it. They've already discontinued various parts of their cloud product.
True, they are unlikely to shut down gmail, search, or Android.
On the other hand google's cloud is a money loser that has slipped to a distant #4 in the cloud rankings.
But like many of Google's revenue-generating products it exists to show Wall Street that they have an increasingly diversified revenue stream (I think advertising is "down" to around 87%). They have lots of bets to try an improve this but little to show for it.
They did recently commit $2B to making GCP a player but I suspect that if that doesn't show results by the end of 2020, investment in this sector will fall precipitously.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/runtime-support...
GCP has never had a major product line shutdown. The only thing that comes close is Google Maps API pricing changes, but technically the service is still there and has even more functionality.
Google Cloud has an official deprecation policy. If a product is labeled GA, Google Cloud guarantees that the service will continue running for at least 12 months since the announcement of deprecation.
Which is better than some small no name startup service provider who might just go out of business tomorrow, but among all the big cloud providers Google is definitely the hardest to trust with longevity.
A more realistic concern is that Google might substantially change the free tier making this more expensive, or might shut down some auxiliary product that would be painful to switch from without migrating clouds completely, or that a payment might bounce for some reason and now I’m locked out of all of my google services without recourse.
Sure the odds of all of the above are relatively low, but from what I’ve seen they are a lot higher on Google than they are on Azure or AWS.
See the full list of deprecations in App Engine: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations/
High profile deprecations are handled carefully and we usually handle them with extended deprecation period with clear migration path/doc and communications. Notable examples in the table:
1. Python 2.5: 4+ years 2. Java 6: 20 months with existing user automigrate to Java 7 3. Java 7: 13 months with existing user automigrate to Java 8 4. Master/slave datastore: 3+ years.
Considering App Engine is the first Google Cloud offering, I'd say we have a very good track record of meet our deprecation policy and usually exceeds it.
They're boilerplate and don't add to the discussion.