(I'm a xoogler, worked in cloud and launched actual products in it, and I strongly prefer AWS. I still don't think Cloud- specifically, GCE and GCS- will go away but I do expect them to continue trimming all the "barely profitable" services)
That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. It would be much better in the long term to have Cloud separate; not as good as if Search & Ads were separate but I don't think that's really viable without enormous costs and much difficulty.
TI was absolutely enormous and it was key to google's early and continued scaling of compute and storage. I don't know if it still exists within Google or got renamed, or what.
But some of these moves have me a bit nervous having built on top of Firebase.
I’m asking, because I am genuinely interested in using Firebase for prototyping, RAD, and whatnot - but I don’t want to put all my eggs into one basket, especially not a basket that I can’t defenestrate.