[brucehart]

I think Google's history of shutting down products would keep me from picking Google Cloud for a major project. If Google Cloud continues to lag behind the market, you have to think they will shut it down like Google Reader, Google Wave and a number of other products. Even if Amazon isn't perfect, I feel like AWS will be around for a long time.

[ohsnapman]

I'm not convinced CIOs are thinking about Reader or Wave. Before entering a big deal, it would make sense for people to read the deprecation policy. Unfortunately, the Cloud Platform deprecation policies are unclear.

The terms of service (https://cloud.google.com/terms/) point to the cloud platform deprecation policy (https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation). The Cloud Platform deprecation policy points to the product launch stage page (https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages), which points back to the "deprecation policy" section of the terms of service!

As a CIO, I would be most concerned with the ecosystem and availability of talent. Google have done a good job trying to reuse some of the same tools and ideas like reuse boto, but writing scripts for their cloud platform vs. AWS is still as different as English and Dutch.

[saurik]

Google has shut down much more than Reader and Wave, or drastically change the paradigm or pricing of their existing offerings in ways that can drastically increase costs. Here is a link to a comment I wrote a year and a half ago, looking at Checkout and Charts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518473

(Note one correction: at the time, the deprecation of OpenID had no migration path; I complained to a bunch of people at Google I/O, as did likely other developers, explaining in detail the migration problem, and sometime in 2014 Google corrected this mistake.)

[ChuckMcM]

As a VP Eng who has made the call on Google vs AWS on a few occasions this has certainly affected my thinking. I see Amazon's web services being a big part of Amazon's revenue and I feel comfortable they are in it for the long haul, whereas I see that Google doesn't even call out its cloud service revenue[1] which suggests it isn't notable. And services with that sort of profile from Google end up dead because Google just doesn't seem able to commit to long term strategic visions.

[1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q3_google_earnings....

[riffraff]

I _think_ people were also annoyed by the GAE pricing change mess.

Also, amazon is known for good support, google is known for horrible support.

[JOnAgain]

Amazon might be known for good support on the customer business, but I've not heard the same regarding AWS -- quite the opposite. If Google support were worse, it would have to just ignore you.

[curun1r]

It think it varies based on your account. We were one of the companies that presented during the keynote at this year's re:Invent. We've also got an enterprise account. I'm not sure if either of these are a determining factor, but we get excellent support. Phone support is good and emails are answered in about an hour. They've also connected us with their engineers when support isn't able to resolve things.

On the whole, I think the only thing they could improve would be to reduce the siloing between different offerings. When dealing with an issue that spans, say, EC2 and Route 53, I would expect their support to talk to each other and present a unified response to the customer rather than require us to deal with two separate support reps. But this type of siloing goes beyond support and applies equally to the AWS product.

[b1twise]

Yes the fact that you were inside the loop enough to be part of the presentation side of re:Invent means your experience is abnormal. You've got the right contacts and profile for them to brag about you.

Having said that, we pay for their 500$/mo support offering and the responses are pretty good. We're also split between AZ's etc as recommended.

[declan]

As <pm> points out nearby, the GAE pricing issue was in 2011. It's now 2015.

I use GAE for http://recent.io/ (which I left CBS last year to found), and have found that prices have been gradually falling for the last few years. I can't speak to what happened in 2011, but I think it's fair to say that GAE was a much less mature product then.

My own sense is that Google would like to diversify away from being 90%+ reliant on advertising, and is highly unlikely to discontinue a paid service that serves that goal, that is profitable, that is under active development, that allows it to compete with Amazon, and that is used for its own products internally. You might as well speculate they'd discontinue search or email.

I use AWS for some smaller components of http://recent.io/, and have found both to be equally reliable. Google also has assigned me a rep who I can call or email when there's a billing issue, sign up for beta trials of new features I'd like to test, address technical problems, etc., and I've never heard from a human at Amazon.

[pm]

Really? That was in 2011. It's now 2015.

[angkec]

Yes that was 2011 but it scared the hell out of me. Since then all my company's project are hosted on Heroku and other Amazon technologies (Simpledb, Dynamo etc.). If I had to have a vendor lock in in exchange of faster development process, I'd prefer to get locked in with Amazon other than Google after that GAE pricing incident.

[pm]

I'm still reeling at the fact the pricing incident is the only thing that sticks in developers' minds, given how easy it was to mitigate.

[angkec]

It wasn't easy to mitigate: re-writes were needed because of the private apis. We ended up doing a lot of optimization to prevent a pet project from costing us too much money, which before the price increase stayed well under the charging threshold. The pricing incident was the only thing on my mind about Google's cloud because we left Google since then. I'm sure things are different now, but then I got too many other things to do before taking a serious look at ditching aws for google.

[alrs]

The price of AWS always goes down. The price of GAE goes god-knows-where, whenever.

[pm]

It really doesn't.

[pm]

Seeing as I can't reply to the comment in question... the price hike article you mention is in 2011. The price hike was a change of system, and everything went up because most people were using Python 2.5 which had no threading support. Python 2.7 had proper threading support, and unsurprisingly when that was enabled, everyone's cost dropped by three-quarters. Google dropped support for 2.5 two years ago.

If were really worried about costs, you'd convert your App Engine app to Go.

[alrs]

"Google App Engine Price Hike Stuns Developers"

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/g...

[RedSocks112]

Google have some pretty good deprecation policies in place with regard to sunsetting their Cloud offering. I recall when I last looked (for appengine a couple of years ago) it equated to a promise to keep the service running for about 3 years. Doing a quick check of terms now, it seems like this has been updated to:

"Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate those Services versions and features identified at https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation without these changes for at least one year after that announcement, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):" https://cloud.google.com/terms/

Not great, but a year is a long enough time to migrate away. That being said, my recent experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784356) has prompted me to migrate away asap.

[narrator]

I personally wouldn't use the Google cloud because I've had the experience when interacting with Google APIs that API stability is not important to them. The Adwords api used to change every few months and old versions would break. This is not convenient for running a production system.

[craigvn]

3 years is not pretty good. Will only operate a product for 1 year after announcement it is being shut down. That is not good, it is laughably bad.

[slyfox117]

While a fair assessment, Google is a cloud provider to its internal teams anyways. While there is some overhead to providing it to customers, it's probably less than the overhead of Google Reader or Google Wave because much of the work is already necessary.

[johannes1234321]

Mund that Google Reader and Google Wave were "free" products whereas cloud offerings are paid, so there is more direct revenue.

[pm24601]

I am with you on this. Google needs to demonstrate enterprise awareness about needed guarantees.

However, the bigger issue is that AWS isn't "broken". There is no compelling reason to look at alternative solutions. In particular alternative solutions that have a learning curve.

If google implemented an Amazon API compatibility library that would help a lot. But right now for me to try out google cloud - I have to recode my app.

Not. going. to. happen.

[craigvn]

This. Google have a bad history of this. And not to mention they also have have a history of introducing new versions totally incompatible from the last (re Angular) would keep me from ever choosing their stack.