| I believe everything that you say. The value it provides is very good. If Google Cloud would have charged 73$ from the start (or after beta), i think there wouldn't be so much anger. The anger comes from, a product was free and now it is not. A lot of people made architectural choices that depended on the price of 0. (You mentioned these cases in your post). However, i believe the bigger issue is, that Google Cloud broke essentially a promise. As a customer I need to be able to trust my cloud provider, because I am literally helpless without it. Can I trust an entity that breaks promises ? No, I can't. I need to worry.
Especially, if I cannot follow the reasoning behind it. If it is true, that Google's overhead went up, because of improvements, then it would have better to have two kinds of clusters (better and paid, old-school and free).
You would have not broken the promise. People can choose on their own pace to upgrade if they need to. Also keep in mind, that you also carry the Google brand. Hence, if other teams of Google break promises (like f.e. Stadia) this will also reflect on the Google Cloud team. Unless you keep a crystal clear track record, i need to assume it can get worse than what you have done right now. My conclusion is that, I will design the cloud architecture I am responsible for, such that it has minimal dependencies on Google Cloud specifics. |
Which promise?