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Comment by gcharris | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why anyone would build anything that relies on a google offering these days. What are they going to discontinue next?

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Supposedly the funding for Google Cloud will go bye-bye if they don't beat Azure by 2023. They won't axe all of Google Cloud, but I bet they'll start killing services that don't make money. (Remember: Google is an advertising company; loss-leading cloud services don't help them sell ads)

Forgive my ignorance, but from a business perspective, is Google Docs, Drive, etc. considered part of Google Cloud or is GSuite distinctly different?

G Suite / Workspace is not typically considered part of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which is Google's equivalent/competitor to AWS and Azure.

They are pretty separate. It is like Azure (Google Cloud Platform) and Office365 (GSuite) for Microsoft.

From a business perspective it is part of Google Cloud overall. Seems like leadership doesn't stay long though. https://9to5google.com/2022/06/29/google-workspace-javier-so... https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-tomb?trk=public_post_share-...

>Supposedly the funding for Google Cloud will go bye-bye if they don't beat Azure by 2023.

Source on this?

Also, Amazon was just an eCommerce store before AWS.

This article/rumor from 2018-ish:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

I wouldn't put too much stock into something from 2018, which was a 3rd party report on a meeting in 2016.

The article is overblown but the point remains: if GCP doesn't stop shedding money, the business is not going to let it burn cash indefinitely on a fool's errand. There will be pull-back and we don't know what services (or regions) will be affected. This may be the first of a trend.

"Google Cloud still operating at a loss despite revenue, client wins" (https://www.ciodive.com/news/google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022/62...). Their revenue increased but so did their losses by about the same percentage. They are still 14% behind Microsoft's marketshare. They are leaning into a niche of "data, analytics, security", which is so broad that it won't take much for their competitors with much larger market share to eat their lunch.

A year ago they said they'd be profitable by this time. A year before that they said the same thing.

It's kind of sad. All that technology and nobody wants them, like a nerd without a date.

nah the article was really overblown. 'we've approved budget for five years. and our goal is to beat azure.' more or less, but that doesnt mean in five years there wouldn't be more budget approved, and it didnt seem like an ultimatum connecting the two. businesses dont plan infinite years out.

while google cloud as a whole i dont see going away, individual products within it(like iot core) are gonna always be up for the chopping block

Given that it is a two horses race for most businesses, I guess they should be cleaning up their CVs.

That's why I prefer to invest time and effort on AWS. I know I won't have to rewrite everything from scratch whenever Google feels like abandoning their projects.

AWS has never discontinued one of their services?

Not trolling, seriously asking (I don't use hyperscalers)

To the best of my knowledge, no. At least none of the AWS services I've used. They've deprecated support for some CAs and stuff, but that seems reasonable.

Not a full service but partial features like S3 Bittorrent support was removed.

Not that I'm aware of. They'd be fully justified in shutting down simpleDB since it hasn't had a feature update in over a decade, but they still keep it running. New accounts can't sign up for it and it only exists in the oldest regions.

They were going to retire old s3 path styles, but they changed their mind after customer feedback.

Ec2 classic networking is going away this month.

But that's ancient technology at this point.

Migration paths and assistance have been repeatedly sent out though - you’d have to literally not care about the system to have this impact you.

As in "the second AWS product launched", and has been deprecated since 2013, which is around the time GCP became more than just App Engine.

In fact the last ec2 classic instances are due to be retired... by today! Though I'd bet no one waited until the very last day to migrate :)

There have been rare changes, like mandatory API version upgrades or some features being turned off. I do not recall anything being removed without a (better) replacement available beforehand, let alone entire simply services being turned off. See simpleDB as the canonical example of long term deprecation but continued availability.

Disclosure: long time Principal at AWS. The above is my own observation and opinion

Yes: Amazon Sumerian.

There was an ML service before sagemaker that you can't start using anymore but I believe it still works for existing customers

They just retired EC2-Classic, one of the largest services they ever had

EC2-Classic was not its own service. It was a specific configuration of EC2. They retired that configuration by providing a full migration path into a new system that could be configured to perfectly replicate the old system if you wanted it to. Having gone through that migration myself with a bunch of services a long time ago, this isn't really a good example of a thing that AWS has killed off.

That's exactly what you will do - invest time, and energy, a lot of both because AWS is a victim of its own legacy. Everything is an after-thought, everything is messy and its genuinely painful to use on anything except some basic UI driven functionality.

EC2 and S3 and some basic hosting stuff is fine but newer services such as AWS Glue, Athena etc are a horrendous mess for anything other than 101 type stuff.

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