[Jedi72]

It's ok I guess but still lets them turn it off if, in their judgement, its an economic burden i.e. costing them money.

If they ever do deprecate something people have built on though they're gonna get absolutely crucified. That's probably better protection than any terms of service.

[Fizzer]

> If they ever do deprecate something people have built on though they're gonna get absolutely crucified.

They do this all the time, and they get crucified every time. I built a Google Hangout App and a Chrome App, both of which were platforms eventually shut down.

This is where the meme came from, and it's why I personally stopped building on top of Google products. A 1-year deprecation policy is no assurance to me if I plan for my app to live longer than that.

[jkaplowitz]

Their approach to things like GCP is very different than their approach to those other areas of Google. But they don't separate their branding or unify their deprecation attitudes enough to avoid cross-org-chart reputation damage like this.

[BurnGpuBurn]

So basically they screw you over on either medium or hard, and according to you the real problem is them not telling us clearly whether or not we receive the medium or hard screw over option.

By the way that GCP is so full of loopholes where Google can get out of its obligations its laughable. So it's not even that clear cut that the GCP is really a better alternative.

And even when it turns out to be legally sound, when stuff like this happens, who's going to sue google over it? Nobody, and they know it.

[jkaplowitz]

Oh, courts routinely give binding weight to words like Google's deprecation policy uses, and any large megacorp who is sufficiently badly impacted by a legalese violation (though SLA issues and deprecation issues are two separate things) wouldn't be scared away from a lawsuit by Google being big. I can imagine EU regulatory action or a class action lawsuit as other possible mechanisms.

But as I say in another comment, the contract is less important than both trust and reality. Keep in mind nobody focuses on how AWS doesn't even have a public deprecation policy.

I'm right there with many people in this thread in agreeing that Google has a trust problem, due mostly to real perception issues stemming from Google's habits outside GCP, which can and do impact people's perceptions of what they'll do with GCP.

The reality of what Google has done and will do with GCP, though, is pretty good. Sure they do sometimes deprecate things in ways Amazon never would. But not nearly as often or as abruptly as they do on the consumer side - that would be commercial suicide - and they do other things better than Amazon. Tradeoffs.

[BurnGpuBurn]

> The reality of what Google has done and will do with GCP, though, is pretty good.

No. It's just words. Actions speak louder than words. Googles' actions in the last couple of days spoke pretty loud. No amount of words will change that.

Are you working for Google PR or something?

[jkaplowitz]

I haven't worked for Google since 2015, and I never worked for their PR department. I was just a rank-and-file engineer (and a rank-and-file tech lead for one small team near the end of my time there). If I worked for Google PR, my comments throughout this thread would have far less criticism of the company's messaging and branding than they do. :)

I'm still a fan of GCP as a suite of products and services, as much as I recognize many of Google's organizational failings and disagree with plenty of their product decisions in other areas of Google.

Google (including GCP) has been bad at external communication as long as I've paid attention, and that includes external communications around incidents. What actions are you referring to, beyond poor and confusing communication (i.e. words) around what is or isn't broken or fixed at what points during the incident? That's most of the problem I'm aware of from this incident.

With that said, part of the reason people notice GCP's outages more than AWS's is that GCP publicly notes their outages way more than AWS does. In other words, among the outages that either cloud has, Google much more often creates an incident on their public status page and Amazon much more often fails to.

My "reality of [...] GCP" comment was about the bigger picture of the cloud platform offering, not any one specific incident.

[kuyan]

> It's ok I guess but still lets them turn it off if, in their judgement, its an economic burden i.e. costing them money.

If a service Google runs is losing money, what reason would they have to not shut it down?

[lovich]

With this terms of service, none. Which is why people don't trust them.

If I pay you for a service that would take time to migrate off of, and you are making money off me now, I am going to be ripshit if you decide to just turn it off because it's suddenly not making money for you in the short term. Google's done this a lot, and the fact that don't provide concrete time lines in their contract gives even less reason to trust them

[jkaplowitz]

It's not about the contract. AWS doesn't even have a deprecation policy in the contract - seriously, GCP provides more legally binding guarantees than AWS. It's about trust.

People look at AWS's track record, and trust that. People look at Google's track record, overlook what to an inside-the-company Googler perspective are dramatically significant organizational boundaries or product lifecycle definitions that are very poorly communicated outside the company, mentally apply reputational damage from one part of Google (or from a preview-stage GCP product) to a different part of the company (or to a generally available GCP product), and don't trust that.

Google has always been worse at externally facing PR than at the internal reality, even when I worked there (2011-2015). Major company weakness.

But the internal reality inside GCP, perceptions aside, is pretty good even now.

[yardie]

This is the subtle, but important, difference between SaaS and PaaS/IaaS. Services are to use. Platforms are built upon. Flickr is a service. If they shutdown I'll get another one. If they shutdown I'll just move to another. GCP is a platform, if they shutdown I have to re-architect the entire thing from scratch.

If it's costing them money they haven't figured out a model, yet, that works in their favour.

[dodobirdlord]

Customers won't pay money in the first place to use a service if it may vanish out from under them? I expect a cloud service provider not to offer a service unless they think it is going to be profitable, and I expect them to continue to offer it even if it turns out not to be profitable, because otherwise I will take my business to a cloud service provider that will give me that guarantee.