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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

I'd be very nervous about being a GCP customer right now. Cloud services is hemorrhaging cash. How long before Google pulls the rug out from underneath a bunch of the services on GCP that aren't making money?

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GCP is the fastest growing Google product, and its revenue growth rate is much higher than its costs growth. So (1) there’s a clear path to profitability and (2) it’s Google’s best story so far for a revenue stream beyond ads. They’ve been saying for several years now with every financial report that they see a huge opportunity in cloud and will continue investing. They definitely don’t lack the cash flow to continue.

>I'd be very nervous about being a GCP customer right now.

If you use Google specific functionality, then yes,you have reasons to worry. If you are host agnostic and use Google cloud just as a deployment target, then you shouldn't worry.

How many people really only use these platforms as deployment targets?

I'm not sure it's a realistic assumption to be able to use GCP without _any_ Google specific functionality. In an enterprise environment, even if you run your workloads on bare VMs, there are usually still things like networking, IAM, etc. that are Google specific. In my experience, there is no way to make all of your components completely cloud agnostic unless you heavily abstract everything using a 3rd party service in which case you might have just kicked the can down the road.

I tell people this all the time. I just get laughed out of a room. GOOGLE WILL SUNSET GCP. They don't work on it, they hate the product, the UI is terrible, they don't use it internally. It is 8 years? behind AWS. The GCP product is designed at scale to compete with AWS ($$) - there just isn't the customer base for 8 year old dying cloud infra. So they are throwing cash at this beast which has NO future. [I manage 300k monthly spend on GCP - and they cut off the ability to get support - we can't afford it - they cut off all communication]. The only people on it are the trapped [bigquery] or stupid.

They could, but I don't think they will. They desperately need to build new revenue streams, as of now, most of the $$$ still come from ads/search.

Sunsetting GCP will immensely damage their reputation.

I agree. We are exclusively using GCP for different services, including bigquery. If they do something like that, they'll be commiting suicide.

I highly doubt that they would ever just sunset GCP entirely. That would be committing suicide. No company would ever trust them ever again for anything even remotely important.

However, they will absolutely shutdown some of the other value-add services like AI-as-a-service and some of these others that are probably not being heavily used.

>they will absolutely shutdown some of the other value-add services

They need to be competitive, and to do so, they must be at least feature pairing with AWS/Azure. I can't think of a single service they can simply shutdown. Actually they need to build more.

I am an AWS long time user. I have toyed around with GCP, and I found it a very disconnected platform. They don't seem to have a unified story around it.

AWS is not perfect, but it is just waaaay ahead. You can tell, they are a heavy customer centric company.

They grew cloud revenue some 30%+

While I'm usually nervous about Google discontinuing things, they'd be idiots to cancel something with $6B in revenue growing that fast.

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