[skybrian]

It's been many years, but a downside back when I worked there was infrastructure churn. Migrating off deprecated infrastructure meant you had to do a lot of work just to stay where you are. Mostly unstaffed products (like Google Reader, say) were at risk of going under due to technical debt.

When App Engine launched, that was great for me because I could write internal tools that were mostly off the treadmill. Unless you used one of App Engine's less-used API's (which themselves eventually got deprecated), your more obscure team-specific services could keep running.

So, lots of great technology is not necessarily great for productivity. I don't know what's happened since. I expected that launching Cloud would result in more mature infrastructure because external customers won't tolerate churn as much. I guess it's sort of true?

[hn_go_brrrrr]

They updated the churn policy to require infrastructure teams to migrate their users, not just dump the work on them. That greatly eased the unfunded mandate load on product teams. That hasn't stopped infrastructure teams from making sweeping changes, though. There's one in particular happening now that's enormous -- to riff on the "changing the engines midflight" analogy, it's replacing the fuselage without anyone noticing.

[danpalmer]

Which one is that? Feel free to just hint or PM me.