I get the skepticism, but these core SaaS offerings tend to have a much longer support life than consumer products. Google’s Bigtable is still around as a cloud offering, and it’s almost 20 years old at this point.
Spanner is used for a lot of internal Google services, too. Spanner has basically been eating all the other databases Google uses internally. Nom nom nom, every database that used to be something else is now Spanner.
GCP is profitable and growing 27% YoY. It made more money than YouTube ads did in Q2 2023. In what world would it make sense to shut down GCP at this point?
I think the "google shuts things down" trope is justified and something that I wince at every time I see something like this, but GCP isn't a random pet project that loses money and has no users. It's a very successful enterprise business.
(disclaimer: I work at google in cloud, so obviously I have personal bias, but this is just my opinion based on the pure numbers.)
I really doubt that. They’re starting to finally turn a profit ($200 million) and it’s a 8 billion in revenue a quarter line of business. Google shuts down businesses that aren’t as revenue generating but 8 billion a quarter (32B annually) is a massive business and the “losses” are likely mostly from R&D reinvestments to keep growing that line of business.
Spanner is used for a lot of internal Google services, too. Spanner has basically been eating all the other databases Google uses internally. Nom nom nom, every database that used to be something else is now Spanner.