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Comment by Greenisus | Hacker News Reader

This looks awesome, but I would be hesitant to try it since you can't know if Google will keep the service alive a few years from now.

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I don't get this attitude towards commercial Google products. You are a paying customer that is very likely to use other Google cloud services. It would be stupid to annoy a large subset of the paying customers by not providing a clear roadmap of sunsetting. And Google stupid is not.

I am excited and will gladly try it on some side projects.

You may have missed when they jacked up AppEngine prices. It was fine for a lot of people already making significant money with their app but it basically killed my app (would have been unjustifiably expensive to keep running). I won't be trying proprietary google infrastructure again anytime soon.

A clear sunsetting roadmap still means that you trusted your business to something Google no longer cares about. It doesn't protect you from the cost of migration.

In my experience as a GAE customer, I was surprised at how much they didn't seem to care.

This is a cloud service. I'd imagine they will be much less likely to kill these services outright. The impact on paying customers would just be too large. That's not to say they won't sunset certain features though.

I don't think you can get more "paying customers" than Google Checkout, but that just got axed.

The issue was they weren't making enough money. I seriously think it was a small sliver part of a pie chart dominated by PayPal and Amazon.

Ok, but we were talking about paying customers, and the people using Checkout were certainly paying for it.

The impact of killing Google Checkout for customers using it was probably minimal, since nobody was using Google Checkout (hence the reason Google killed it.)

Cloud services on the other hand, killing those would be highly disruptive and would probably effectively kill any products built on top of them. It's hard to imagine Google killing any of these services, unless one of them say is wildly unpopular and only a small handful of people will be outraged if it is killed. Even then, it's seems insane to think about Google shutting off database or computing services people are using to run businesses.

You don't know that any company will keep a service alive a few years from now. Either (a) the company is willing to shutdown services that don't make sufficient money to justify keeping them, which creates a risk, or (b) the company is not willing to do that, which creates a risk of the company failing and either going out of business or being purchased by someone who is willing to shutdown the parts that aren't making money.

I think this is Appengine's datastore provided as a service. In which case it isn't going away - Appengine is heavily used.

Determining the fate of Google products might be an interesting use of prediction markets.

Is there a cloud service that gives you those kinds of guarantees?

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