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Comment by nezo | Hacker News Reader

Is it going to be beta or alpha, like most Google Cloud services?

Google Product Manager here.

Not sure why you think most Google Cloud Services are in beta.

The Google Cloud products page [1] lists 17 main products. Two are in alpha (Container Engine, Deployment Manager), one is in beta (Pub/Sub).

The rest are fully supported. There are some beta features here and there...but saying "most" are in beta is certainly not correct.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/products/

Example: Data Flow is in Alpha & Logging is in Beta.

Go on App Engine has been in beta for years

Sure, a GA product like App Engine often has features that are in Alpha/Beta/Experimental states. That different than the major product being in a pre-release state.

Why? The point is, Google has a habit of releasing tons of shiny new Cloud Platform services (whether they're considered "separate products", part of an existing product, or whatever), but keeps them in alpha/beta for a long time. Go support has been there for years, and it's still "experimental". Some of the new products released last year at I/O 2014 are still in alpha, and we're already approaching I/O 2015. Pedantry aside, this deserves discussion.

And...so what? Why does it deserve discussion. Sure, Google openly has always favored a practice of releasing products/features very early to to validate them and evolve them through real-world use with willing early adopters that accept the risks associated with potentially unstable feature sets of not-yet-stable products.

What's the issue, here?

I recently just found out that PHP is in Beta (by the support team). That wasn't obvious to me when looking through the website / documentation

I think that that it's beta because it's still the case that almost nothing works. Try setting up TLS on App Engine for anything other than your primary Google Apps domain. This has been broken for years, despite Google pushing TLS through Chrome policy changes.

The Google Cloud products page [1] lists 17 main products. Two are in alpha (Container Engine, Deployment Manager), one is in beta (Pub/Sub). The rest are fully supported.

Wait a second. I just clicked though the items on that page, and the following are listed as alpha:

  Container Engine
  Cloud Dataflow
  Cloud Deployment Manager

The following are in Beta:

  HTTP/HTTPS Load Balancing
  Virtual Private Network
  Cloud Pub/Sub
  Cloud Monitoring
  Cloud Logging

If these aren't in beta/alpha, then maybe you should update your docs.

Actually, I just filed a bug internally to fix docs. You're right -- alpha/beta is not clearly shown consistently enough (I missed at least one in going through that list).

In some cases, there are GA products with alpha/beta features & languages, so it may be difficult to figure out the best way to communicate at the top level (e.g., the examples pointed out for a given feature in a given language, or HTTP load balancing vs Network Load balancing).

But in cases where it's clearly a beta product, it should be clear.

Managed VM's, PHP and Go on Appengine are all beta as well.

Autoscaler and Instance Groups on compute engine are beta as well.

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