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by baskire 2022 days ago
Worse than that. Its AppEngine Standard vs AppEngine Flex vs Cloud Functions vs Cloud Run vs KNative (Cloud Run, but different).

Oh and if you used AppEngine Standard, you can't move to Flex as Flex came with a whole new set of libraries. And Flex to CloudRun didn't exactly have a seamless migration.

Along the way they changed multiple internals with deprecation causing code base changes. Such-as Memecache, ImageAPI, Monitoring price changes.

I can't imagine any enterprise who's used the ecosystem continuing. The sheer number of architecture impacting changes leads to huge operational overhead costs to maintain applications running on this infrastructure.

1 comments

Everything above. Friends don't let friends use App Engine, and by extension, fringe GCloud services they could break or shitcan at literally any moment

The technology of a vendor is way less important than its culture. So far Gcloud seems to understand that. Maybe the App Engine team is outside that org

> Everything above. Friends don't let friends use App Engine, and by extension, fringe GCloud services they could break or shitcan at literally any moment

Not sure why you think they can shitcan them at literally any moment. Although GCP's track record of deprecation is of course far worse than AWS's, they do make and adhere to promises in their terms of service that, in most cases, they will give at least 12 months before deprecating services which have reached general availability. This includes both App Engine and Cloud Run, minus any features that have not yet reached general availability and minus one very fair documented exception for App Engine.

Details:

https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation

https://cloud.google.com/terms <-- search for "Discontinuation of Services"

Disclosure: I used to work for Google, including the GCP team, but I haven't worked for Google in over 5 years and am not speaking for Google here.

That’s false. The policy only covers services being turned down. A-la Google reader style. Not api changes. Not forced sdk/software upgrades. Or pricing changes.
It does cover backwards incompatible API changes - read the second link I provided:

>Further, Google will notify Customer at least 12 months before significantly modifying a Customer-facing Google API in a backwards-incompatible manner.

What are you referring to with forced sdk/software changes? Maybe it's the same exception I mentioned for App Engine when a previously supported language runtime goes out of support by the upstream language community?

As for the famous Google App Engine price hike everyone likes to point to, the lower price was only at a pre-general availability launch stage.

You're right that they don't make any specific guarantees that they won't hike prices on short notice, but within the scope of Google Cloud Platform features that have already reached general availability, when have they done that?