[byteofbits]

We rely heavily on GCP and, whilst nothing is impossible, it would be incredibly painful for us to transition away.

I personally think it’s quite unlikely that they shutter the entire business and all the product lines - many of them are extremely high margin and are already in a stable position. Given how many of their products they have designated as Google Cloud (last I heard Workspace is being attributed to Cloud revenue now) it seems more likely we would see the killing of new or in-development product lines such as Anthos or Alloy DB whereas the more established and profitable areas such as Workspace, BigQuery, Looker, GKE, BigTable and others would be allowed to continue to exist in some form.

As someone who has used all the major Cloud Providers, I have generally found the Google products to be the best engineered with “the right sized nut” normally being available, rather than an exercise in cryptography to decipher the documentation for a workaround. It would be a colossal waste and shame IMO to throw that away.

As a customer, I think they are struggling (as the article concurs) with their approach to Sales, Marketing and Support. It is frankly years behind their competition and recently (~2 years) have seen an increase in effort but not real shift in the end result. Part of this problem is their insistence on using resellers and partners for any interesting size deal where these partners themselves are really not up to scratch.

For now, we won’t be taking action to de-risk our position beyond ensuring that a migration of some kind is technically feasible given sufficient notice. I think they will start to drop the investment into the platform and focus on extracting revenue from what they’ve got - but I don’t see it going the way of Stadia and siblings from the consumer side. It’s my hope that revenue (and the narrative it allows them to tell the market around diversification) is worth keeping their crown jewel products running.

[Aeolun]

> I personally think it’s quite unlikely that they shutter the entire business and all the product lines

Have you paid any attention to actions taken by Google over the past 10’ish years?

If I’ve learned anything it’s that nothing is sacred.

I’d make sure I have a solid migration path.

[byteofbits]

I’ve watched Google’s behaviour towards its products for the 10 years cited and referenced it in my post above.

Reviewing the infamous https://killedbygoogle.com/ I don’t see much to draw the conclusion that Google kills enterprise products. Which products do you use to draw this inference or are you simply saying you believe the mentality they use for their consumer products would be used for their cloud products?

In either case, I do not think it’s impossible they kill GCP. Just that it is extremely unlikely and without historical precedent w.r.t their cloud business.

[Aeolun]

> without historical precedent w.r.t their cloud business

That’s not hard, considering they’ve existed for only a few years. In that time they’ve done plenty of things that make me feel like their behavior is questionable (the 10x price hike for maps API comes to mind)

[byteofbits]

Considering Google App Engine launched in 2008 and Compute Engine in 2012 I would argue it exceeds "a few years" and begins to form precedent.

I would also argue that it is not a reasonable comparison in this context to conflate pricing changes with deprecation.

[mysterydip]

Even if Google keeps GCP operating indefinitely, I feel like there's always the shadow looming of account termination/suspension with no warning or explanation. Do you have a strategy for if this happens?

[byteofbits]

As a business customer, we have a dedicated account manager and customer support engineer who in the worst instance any member of our incident response team could ring directly.

We also work with a Google Cloud Partner that we maintain out of band communication with who would be able to mediate account restoration.

All in all, I do not think a business account faces this risk at all and it’s largely a narrative developed from their consumer business where humans are hard to reach.