[dekhn]

Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) bring in multiple billions of revenue a year from enterprise. The company invested billions in new data centers and transferred large parts of intenral technical infrastructure into cloud to build these products over a decade.

If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely have no future in any enterprise product ever again.

I do expect them to aggressively trim small products from the cloud lineup that aren't worth the engineering investment. IoT clouds were a popular thing for several months and then people realized there wasn't a huge market or tons of profit.

[sink]

As a former head of engineering for a mid-sized IoT company with many tens of thousands of devices deployed in the field using a competing product (no, not the AWS one), seeing this made my stomach churn.

This was my second biggest fear after waking up to a ransomware attack.

It's hard to imagine anyone trusting Google for IoT again. I will certainly put them at the bottom of my list for any other infrastructure I develop against in the future, and ensure that we have a documented exit strategy should it come to pass.

The idea of having just one year to develop against a new IoT core, test it, update all deployed devices, and then coordinate logistics and budget to do truck rolls when things invariably go wrong is really grinding my gears.

I feel for all of the startups having to deal with this. To the folks who are invariably scrambling, I really hope you either got advanced notice, or you're getting an extension far beyond what is publicized. Edit: The more I think about this, the more I want to believe there must be contracts in place for certain customers that extend the lifetime of this product beyond what is public. There must be.

IoT is not an easy business. Designing and programming hardware is hard. Supply chains are hard. Maintaining working inventory is hard. Building logistics networks for installation and maintenance is hard. Courting and explaining to investors why you don't have the profit margins of a pure SaaS business is hard. Relying on your cloud provider to give you more than 1 year notice should be the easy part.

[derefr]

> It's hard to imagine anyone trusting Google for IoT again.

I mean, presumably they decided the IoT vertical just wasn't for them altogether.

If Google intended some new service to take this one's place, they would have 1. launched it before deprecating this one; and 2. built a backend shim to route data sent to the old API into the new backend, so that people's code wouldn't have to change. (Like they did for Firebase, and for Stackdriver, and for anything else they actually cared about keeping the business of the customers of.)

This move, meanwhile, clearly sends the message of "we don't want to be in this business; stop trying to buy this kind of service from us; just go away." It's the feel of being on the receiving end of the "fire your [bad] customers" advice — just applied to "firing" an entire (bad?) market.

[dekhn]

Had I started an IoT company, I would not have depended on any cloud IoT product. VMs, blob storage, containers, load balancers, hosted databases. But not anything labelled "IoT".

[bigiain]

I have worked in an IoT company, and sometime time-to-market makes uncomfortable dependancies necessary. Hopefully people making those compromises have escape plans, but I doubt all of them do. I expect to read several "Our incredible journey" product end-of-life posts as Google kill off startups without a way to recover from this shutdown...

[speedgoose]

I worked at an IoT company, and I saw a few demos of IoT cloud solutions. We never found them to provide a lot of value. They were solving the easy problems and ignoring the hard ones.

[solarkraft]

> Relying on your cloud provider to give you more than 1 year notice should be the easy part

Isn't that exactly what contracts are for? Can you build an entire company on the premise that some random cloud service will always be available?

[senssei]

I fully agree that having more than just one year to migrate it's a bit short. Especially within the lifecycle of the devices that counts in decades.

Changing the ingress endpoint shouldn't be a big deal via OTA or configuration change. The lack of such configuration in the first place would be concerning for any new devices.

Ransomware attack it's a real threat.

[psanford]

AWS doesn't do this. AWS keeps around old deprecated services that they aren't developing new features for, in perpetuity (e.g. SimpleDB). They might not launch that service into new regions, but they will keep it around in existing regions to not break customers who depend on it.

This is a reflection of AWS being "customer obsessed" where Google is not.

[wildfire]

If they were "customer obsessed" even though they are not doing development of a service, they would lauch it anyway in all regions.

By not doing this, they make it hard for their customers to be multi-regional.

It is easy to spin "customer obsession" any way you like.

[doctor_eval]

That's the least generous, and least logical, possible take, and I'm the opposite of a fan of Amazon or AWS.

If a customer is not multi-region already, and if Amazon hasn't promised multi-region availability, then the customer has simply chosen the wrong product. It's not in anyone's interest for Amazon to waste resources rolling out a product that they can't sell, just because maybe someone wants to expand their existing use.

[freedomben]

Exactly. AWS never promises every product in every DC. If you build on it before it's available in a region you need it in, it's a choice and risk you are making

[WoahNoun]

There's a lot of money in IoT; it's just not rapid growth. It's a business line that will require years of enterprise sales followed by the integration work. This video of from 2019 shows Volkswagon starting a rollout of AWS's IoT cloud for 122 factories world wide. I don't think Google is good at running a business with multiyear sales cycle followed by multiyear scale-ups to starting making money.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/volkswagen-vid...

[throwayyy479087]

Large revenue numbers don’t guarantee large profits. Sometimes you’re just losing more money, faster.

[acdha]

There’s no doubt that they have invested a lot of money but that doesn’t guarantee returns and data centers have a fair amount of cost to keep running.

The big thing I’d like is to have Google Cloud broken out as a separate business. While it’s true that shutting it down would harm them, I haven’t gotten the impression that their management are especially concerned. As an enterprise customer of both, AWS seems way more motivated not just to develop their service but also just to do things like show up. Trying to get GCP people to sell things like Anthos was surprisingly hard, like they thought it was 2005 and people would buy just because of their name.

[dekhn]

I reward AWS with my business and tolerate GCP when necessary.

What's funny is there was a core of engineers back in 2009 who understood everything necessary to get the technical side of Cloud to be competitive with AWS, and mostly succeeded, but by then, it was clear that Google simply didn't know how to market to enterprises. The whole thing was a squandered opportunity and I simply did not understand at the time (2009-2011) just how unprepared Google's leadership was to expand beyond ads.

[acdha]

Strong agreement - I really think ads’ strength cost them multiple markets just because nobody was really worried about not being profitable. I’ve heard mixed things about working at AWS but everyone I know who’s worked there was keenly aware of whether customers liked what they worked on.

[Gibbon1]

My snide remark is Google the hive mind doesn't understand what a customer is. As in someone who in return for you promising to do something on an ongoing basis will give you money. Googlers react to that as if a street hustler is trying to get them to play three-card monte.

More likely they have the same problem Intel had. Intel had a lucrative impossible to replicate business in processors. As a result they regularly abandoned one market segment after another because they couldn't get the gross margin they expected. Googles doing the same exact thing.

Other problem is googles business is backwards in that they set the requirements out for what they'll do not the supposed see above customer. All these other business ventures have customers with strict demands that they want met.

[rkagerer]

I simply did not understand at the time (2009-2011) just how unprepared Google's leadership was to expand beyond ads.

That's a succinct and on-point observation.