[boulos]

See my new comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14344415 (I'm on a plane, so late to the party). I'm disappointed in this particular service deprecation, but your broader point applies regardless of the specific service: once you start using several, there's the potential for burning a lot of your engineering budget just rewriting and retooling.

On a meta level, I've seen an incredibly high number of risk averse companies just using EC2/S3 or GCE/GCS. That's not to say I disagree with using tons of services (that's how you get value!), but it's clearly food for thought.

I'd love to see historical data on the various cloud service turndowns, though I suspect there's too little track record to draw meaningful conclusions (and for some folks, abandonware is just as bad as turndown).

[Edit for disclosure since I wasn't in this thread before]

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.