[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.