The terms of service (https://cloud.google.com/terms/) point to the cloud platform deprecation policy (https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation). The Cloud Platform deprecation policy points to the product launch stage page (https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages), which points back to the "deprecation policy" section of the terms of service!
As a CIO, I would be most concerned with the ecosystem and availability of talent. Google have done a good job trying to reuse some of the same tools and ideas like reuse boto, but writing scripts for their cloud platform vs. AWS is still as different as English and Dutch.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518473
(Note one correction: at the time, the deprecation of OpenID had no migration path; I complained to a bunch of people at Google I/O, as did likely other developers, explaining in detail the migration problem, and sometime in 2014 Google corrected this mistake.)
[1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q3_google_earnings....
Also, amazon is known for good support, google is known for horrible support.
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/g...
If were really worried about costs, you'd convert your App Engine app to Go.
On the whole, I think the only thing they could improve would be to reduce the siloing between different offerings. When dealing with an issue that spans, say, EC2 and Route 53, I would expect their support to talk to each other and present a unified response to the customer rather than require us to deal with two separate support reps. But this type of siloing goes beyond support and applies equally to the AWS product.
Having said that, we pay for their 500$/mo support offering and the responses are pretty good. We're also split between AZ's etc as recommended.
I use GAE for http://recent.io/ (which I left CBS last year to found), and have found that prices have been gradually falling for the last few years. I can't speak to what happened in 2011, but I think it's fair to say that GAE was a much less mature product then.
My own sense is that Google would like to diversify away from being 90%+ reliant on advertising, and is highly unlikely to discontinue a paid service that serves that goal, that is profitable, that is under active development, that allows it to compete with Amazon, and that is used for its own products internally. You might as well speculate they'd discontinue search or email.
I use AWS for some smaller components of http://recent.io/, and have found both to be equally reliable. Google also has assigned me a rep who I can call or email when there's a billing issue, sign up for beta trials of new features I'd like to test, address technical problems, etc., and I've never heard from a human at Amazon.
"Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate those Services versions and features identified at https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):" https://cloud.google.com/terms/
Not great, but a year is a long enough time to migrate away. That being said, my recent experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784356) has prompted me to migrate away asap.
However, the bigger issue is that AWS isn't "broken". There is no compelling reason to look at alternative solutions. In particular alternative solutions that have a learning curve.
If google implemented an Amazon API compatibility library that would help a lot. But right now for me to try out google cloud - I have to recode my app.
Not. going. to. happen.