[defen]

For me, GCP comes with unquantifiable existence risk. As in, how do I know that it won't get shut down in 5 years when some VP sees that it's not bringing in as much money as it should? I trust Amazon more in this regard, and their offering is not "so bad" that I feel a need to switch.

[noahl]

I understand your point, but GCP does address this in the terms of service (disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud):

7. Deprecation of Services

7.1 Discontinuance of Services. Subject to Section 7.2, Google may discontinue any Services or any portion or feature for any reason at any time without liability to Customer.

7.2 Deprecation Policy. Google will announce if it intends to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to the Services specified at the URL in the next sentence. 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):

(i) required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or

(ii) doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.

The above policy is the "Deprecation Policy."

[seanp2k2]

Not just the whole platform, but specific APIs / services being deprecated / shut down too. Amazon isn't untouched by this problem (see also: VPC migration from EC2 Classic) , but I agree that given their reputation, I don't trust Google to keep even very useful widely-loved stuff around forever.

[AdamN]

Existence risk here is HUGE. If GCP doesn't move the needle, Google will shut it down. AWS is a much more living organism and I can't see Amazon shutting it down before their drones take over ...

[mikecb]

To shut down GCP, they would be shutting down the same services and infrastructure that power their own services. The dogfooding memo from years back is being taken to heart, and you're seeing more and more exposure of internal services and infrastructure.

The scary thing would be if it ends up reducing the rate of innovation because they worry about changing APIs or services too much; obsolete accumulates quickly when you're serving large numbers of people because most business want to write once run till it's dead. But this is true of any service that exposes anything but an extreme abstraction.

[sofaofthedamned]

Exactly. If it wasn't making the money they'd just be shutting the public interface to this thing. It's not like it's orthogonal to their usual business, which is lots of computers and storage doing random workloads.

[dcgoss]

Right after they sealed the huge deal with Spotify? Seems like a near-term shutdown is unlikely.

[abrookewood]

Yes, unfortunately, GCE's reputation is tarnished by Google's approach to consumer-level services. I hope this changes over time - we need more competitors in this space.