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Comment by andrewedstrom | Hacker News Reader

Not pictured: the cost of switching to DynamoDB when this service inevitably gets shut down in two years.

I get the skepticism, but these core SaaS offerings tend to have a much longer support life than consumer products. Google’s Bigtable is still around as a cloud offering, and it’s almost 20 years old at this point.

Spanner is used for a lot of internal Google services, too. Spanner has basically been eating all the other databases Google uses internally. Nom nom nom, every database that used to be something else is now Spanner.

Remember AppEngine?

Not sure what you mean by “remember AppEngine”.

Price increased significantly in 2010 I guess?

It's still around. I remember using it in 2008.

the Google product that still exists?

There’s no way spanner gets shut down. It’s critical to so much of Google’s internal infra.

That doesn't address GCP itself getting shut down in 2 years.

Is there a reason to believe this will happen?

Lol. The people you find on Hacker News sometimes...

I really doubt that. They’re starting to finally turn a profit ($200 million) and it’s a 8 billion in revenue a quarter line of business. Google shuts down businesses that aren’t as revenue generating but 8 billion a quarter (32B annually) is a massive business and the “losses” are likely mostly from R&D reinvestments to keep growing that line of business.

GCP is profitable and growing 27% YoY. It made more money than YouTube ads did in Q2 2023. In what world would it make sense to shut down GCP at this point?

I think the "google shuts things down" trope is justified and something that I wince at every time I see something like this, but GCP isn't a random pet project that loses money and has no users. It's a very successful enterprise business.

(disclaimer: I work at google in cloud, so obviously I have personal bias, but this is just my opinion based on the pure numbers.)

Engaging with comments that are this stupid only perpetuates the problem. Just look at this thread as a whole.

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