I don't see the point of making this distinction. First, selling it to another company is just shutting it down but doing you the courtesy of migrating the dat

I don't see the point of making this distinction. First, selling it to another company is just shutting it down but doing you the courtesy of migrating the data to another vendor. It still results in all of the management UIs, integrations, and APIs that you rely on going offline. It just avoids creating an immediate outage (but it will create one eventually, unless you start interacting with this other vendor). Second, the point has repeatedly been made that GCP is fundamentally different from Google's other offerings and essentially immune from being shut down (even in the responses to this article). That may be true for GCP as a whole, but this proves that it's not true of the individual sub-components of GCP, even ones that seem extremely core. I actually agree with the article that GCP is just good in ways that competitors aren't but... Running on their platform does continue to be a bit nerve-wracking.