Hacker News Reader

Comment by siddharthgoel88 | Hacker News Reader

Lately, Google has been killing products on spree. Today I read the news (1 month old) that now Firebase Dynamic Links are also being killed. Coincidently, in my current organisation we went live with some solution based on Firebase Dynamic Links recently with some partners. And now with this news, we have already started the discussion about it's migration.

A bigger discussion is that how easy is it for Google to pull the plug, then how is one expected to rely on Google for various cloud solutions they offer. Also recently Google had shut down it's domain service. Gergely had also written a blog about it https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/google-domains-to-shut-do... .

In midst of all this chaos in Google Cloud offering, my questions are:

  * Is your company concerned about these changes?
  * If yes, then what is the plan of action you guys are planning?
  * What are your view on this topic?

View on HN

Yes. These actions just give me more fire as argument against every using something that is done by google. Be it GCP, Firebase or anything else, really.

Isn't that an argument against using any service by an external vendor that you can't trivially replace?

I guess using services which you can spin up yourself from free software code should be ok.

Isn’t this going in circles? SaaS is completely normal in corporate America, but Google stands out for killing things. The question can’t reasonably be “saas or not” for most companies while “really google?” Is extremely par for the course.

Migrating SaaSes is a normal activity in corporate America and often wins the ROI calculation, but building on GCP is generally questionable at this point.

Sure, Google is "special" among large vendors covering a wide market (Amazon, Microsoft) that "fails fast".

But if you stick to long running products, even with Google, you are unlikely to have that issue. Eg. so many companies are relying on Gmail and Google Docs for their work: I don't think anyone feels they are going away anytime soon. Basic Google Cloud services (eg GKE) are likely to keep humming along fine.

But there are a number of smaller SaaSes that will show up with a specific niche product (like Firebase Dynamic Links here) that may be gone as quickly as their VC capital runs out.

It's a shame because Firebase is a really good product and one of the few first-party solutions with a really complete local emulator.

The Firebase CLI is really good and the platform itself is one of the best for startups focusing on speed and low complexity to get to an MVP.

Firebase at large seems too good to kill. They could sell it instead.

Honestly it has come to the point that I will ask which cloud provider the company is using in an interview and I turned down a job offer once because of it.

For me it just isn't worth the risk of working somewhere that uses GCP. The high risk of there being financial issues when google announces something but also just the risk of that completely destroying a roadmap.

It just isn't worth it to me personally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com