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Will Google guarantee a minimum number of years to support this platform? I would hate to dedicate time and resources to this (sounds pretty useful) and then ha

Will Google guarantee a minimum number of years to support this platform? I would hate to dedicate time and resources to this (sounds pretty useful) and then have Google shut this down in the near future.

tjpnz 8y ago
No idea why people are downvoting you. This is a very important question to ask when it comes to Google services.
- kjksf 8y ago
  If nothing else, what do you expect Google to say? "No, we'll definitely be dropping this"? The services that Google dropped were either big bets that ended up as massive failures in the marketplace (e.g. wave, google+) or services that were neither big nor strategic to google (e.g. google reader, google code). GCP is neither. If you're not convinced by the fact that Google has been pouring billions into Google Cloud for over 10 years now, organizes multi-day conferences promoting it, launches new features monthly, then no rational argument will convince you that they won't drop GCP because they also dropped google reader.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    > GCP is neither. Sure. But this one little service inside GCP? Tiny.
  - j16sdiz 8y ago
    google+ for gsuite is still available .
- theDoug 8y ago
  It is an important question, but Google services which are largely consumer-based and no cost are a very different world from Google Cloud. People get a lot of Internet Cool Guy points these days from falsely conflating the two. I'm not the to make commitments but our history has been solid, and our deprecation policy is embedded in our terms of service for every Cloud user. The only product I can remember us deprecating in GCP was Prediction API in favor of the much-preferred Cloud Machine Learning Engine, and with that came communication to every single affected admin and a _year_ before cut-off. https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/
  - rapsey 8y ago
    and the second risk is google banning your corporate account for some arbitrary reason and killing your entire company overnight. Unless one is twitter sized limiting ones exposure to googles arbitrary decisions is quite reasonable. I can get a person to talk to at microsoft for my tiny account easy and I know neither they nor Amazon will just shut me down overnight.
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    Uh, just last year Google increased the price of developers using the maps API by an order of magnitude with no grandfathering policy, which for many users was effectively shutting the API off completely. It's not just the consumer side; Google doesn't exactly have a spotless reputation for developers, and assuming the post must be somebody faking being concerned for "Internet Cool Guy points" is just tone deaf.
johnwheeler 8y ago
totally reasonable question given googles horrendous track record on product maintenance.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  Google Cloud has had zero dead products in a decade existence. Just because Google phased out a couple browser extensions and a RSS feed reader doesn't mean they have a "horrendous track record" when it comes to real enterprise-tier services such as Cloud.
  - twapi 8y ago
    Google killed many popular products without any proper reason. Remember Google Reader??!
    - jasonvorhe 8y ago
      This is a thread about Google Cloud.
  - tomschlick 8y ago
    > Google Cloud has had zero dead products in a decade existence. Didn't they just 10x the price of Maps api calls recently?
  - realusername 8y ago
    It's not the dead products on my case I fear but the lockdown of a Gmail account, there's already 2 gmail accounts I can't access despite knowing the password. I would not use GCP just because of that, everything might work fine and then one day you're locked out of your account and can't do anything.
    - privateSFacct 8y ago
      Just had this with an account I setup for my parents. I have recovery email AND know when account was created - not good enough. My parents use a landline that can't get a text and apparently enough to deny them (Google won't Dona voice call). Would pay 50 to unlock. Only option is to setup a new account. Ugh. This same email used for Apple Id and they like their Apple stuff
nl 8y ago
It's a beta. It's reasonable for a company not to guarantee support timeframes during a beta program.
mattsoldo 8y ago
Hi. I manage App Engine (the original "serverless" product at Google). This is a very understandable concern, given the importance of having a platform on which you can rely. Contractually Google Cloud provides a 1 year notice before discontinuing (or making backwards incompatible changes) to products. This is for generally available (GA) products. Cloud Run is in beta, so technically it could be decided not to bring it to GA. This is why some conservative orgs tend to wait for products to be GA before releasing them. From a technical perspective, Cloud Run was designed to be highly portable and idiomatic. If the service were discontinued (or you just didn't like it), you should be able to take your container image, and run it anywhere else. Odds are you would be using some other Google Cloud Services, so you would likely want to run in an environment with low network latency to Google Cloud (Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine being obvious candidates). From a historical perspective, I'd say that Google Cloud goes above and beyond in supporting older products. App Engine is about to hit its 11th anniversary. We are still running PHP 5.5 apps and backporting security patches to the runtime, despite the language losing community support 3 years ago. We are still turning down an old product called "Managed Virtual Machines", which has now been in a deprecated (but running) state for longer than it was GA! From an emotional perspective, I think that Google is eyed with a lot of suspicion for turning off products. Google Reader - enough said. But as someone on the thread pointed out, Google Cloud is a very different business from the rest of Google. Google (!cloud) is a consumer company at a scale where if a product matters when it hits a billion users. Google Cloud is an enterprise company. Scale still matters, but not in the same way it does in consumer. I can't wait for hacker news folks to try Cloud Run. Its an awesome product.
- clhodapp 8y ago
  Cloud Run is in beta, so technically it could be decided not to bring it to GA. This is why some conservative orgs tend to wait for products to be GA before releasing them. Ah that's one reason not to use GCP betas. Another big one is the complete lack of any public uptime target. In my opinion, this makes the betas nearly as bad as alphas with respect to using them in production.
  - boulos 8y ago

tjpnz 8y ago

No idea why people are downvoting you. This is a very important question to ask when it comes to Google services.

kjksf 8y ago
If nothing else, what do you expect Google to say? "No, we'll definitely be dropping this"? The services that Google dropped were either big bets that ended up as massive failures in the marketplace (e.g. wave, google+) or services that were neither big nor strategic to google (e.g. google reader, google code). GCP is neither. If you're not convinced by the fact that Google has been pouring billions into Google Cloud for over 10 years now, organizes multi-day conferences promoting it, launches new features monthly, then no rational argument will convince you that they won't drop GCP because they also dropped google reader.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  > GCP is neither. Sure. But this one little service inside GCP? Tiny.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  google+ for gsuite is still available .
theDoug 8y ago
It is an important question, but Google services which are largely consumer-based and no cost are a very different world from Google Cloud. People get a lot of Internet Cool Guy points these days from falsely conflating the two. I'm not the to make commitments but our history has been solid, and our deprecation policy is embedded in our terms of service for every Cloud user. The only product I can remember us deprecating in GCP was Prediction API in favor of the much-preferred Cloud Machine Learning Engine, and with that came communication to every single affected admin and a _year_ before cut-off. https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/
- rapsey 8y ago
  and the second risk is google banning your corporate account for some arbitrary reason and killing your entire company overnight. Unless one is twitter sized limiting ones exposure to googles arbitrary decisions is quite reasonable. I can get a person to talk to at microsoft for my tiny account easy and I know neither they nor Amazon will just shut me down overnight.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  Uh, just last year Google increased the price of developers using the maps API by an order of magnitude with no grandfathering policy, which for many users was effectively shutting the API off completely. It's not just the consumer side; Google doesn't exactly have a spotless reputation for developers, and assuming the post must be somebody faking being concerned for "Internet Cool Guy points" is just tone deaf.

johnwheeler 8y ago

totally reasonable question given googles horrendous track record on product maintenance.

ehsankia 8y ago
Google Cloud has had zero dead products in a decade existence. Just because Google phased out a couple browser extensions and a RSS feed reader doesn't mean they have a "horrendous track record" when it comes to real enterprise-tier services such as Cloud.
- twapi 8y ago
  Google killed many popular products without any proper reason. Remember Google Reader??!
  - jasonvorhe 8y ago
    This is a thread about Google Cloud.
- tomschlick 8y ago
  > Google Cloud has had zero dead products in a decade existence. Didn't they just 10x the price of Maps api calls recently?
- realusername 8y ago
  It's not the dead products on my case I fear but the lockdown of a Gmail account, there's already 2 gmail accounts I can't access despite knowing the password. I would not use GCP just because of that, everything might work fine and then one day you're locked out of your account and can't do anything.
  - privateSFacct 8y ago
    Just had this with an account I setup for my parents. I have recovery email AND know when account was created - not good enough. My parents use a landline that can't get a text and apparently enough to deny them (Google won't Dona voice call). Would pay 50 to unlock. Only option is to setup a new account. Ugh. This same email used for Apple Id and they like their Apple stuff

nl 8y ago

It's a beta. It's reasonable for a company not to guarantee support timeframes during a beta program.

mattsoldo 8y ago

Hi. I manage App Engine (the original "serverless" product at Google). This is a very understandable concern, given the importance of having a platform on which you can rely. Contractually Google Cloud provides a 1 year notice before discontinuing (or making backwards incompatible changes) to products. This is for generally available (GA) products. Cloud Run is in beta, so technically it could be decided not to bring it to GA. This is why some conservative orgs tend to wait for products to be GA before releasing them. From a technical perspective, Cloud Run was designed to be highly portable and idiomatic. If the service were discontinued (or you just didn't like it), you should be able to take your container image, and run it anywhere else. Odds are you would be using some other Google Cloud Services, so you would likely want to run in an environment with low network latency to Google Cloud (Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine being obvious candidates). From a historical perspective, I'd say that Google Cloud goes above and beyond in supporting older products. App Engine is about to hit its 11th anniversary. We are still running PHP 5.5 apps and backporting security patches to the runtime, despite the language losing community support 3 years ago. We are still turning down an old product called "Managed Virtual Machines", which has now been in a deprecated (but running) state for longer than it was GA! From an emotional perspective, I think that Google is eyed with a lot of suspicion for turning off products. Google Reader - enough said. But as someone on the thread pointed out, Google Cloud is a very different business from the rest of Google. Google (!cloud) is a consumer company at a scale where if a product matters when it hits a billion users. Google Cloud is an enterprise company. Scale still matters, but not in the same way it does in consumer. I can't wait for hacker news folks to try Cloud Run. Its an awesome product.

clhodapp 8y ago
Cloud Run is in beta, so technically it could be decided not to bring it to GA. This is why some conservative orgs tend to wait for products to be GA before releasing them. Ah that's one reason not to use GCP betas. Another big one is the complete lack of any public uptime target. In my opinion, this makes the betas nearly as bad as alphas with respect to using them in production.
- boulos 8y ago