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I'm biased having worked on GCP, but I think GCP actually has a very good track record of not sunsetting entire products or removing core functionality. When I

I'm biased having worked on GCP, but I think GCP actually has a very good track record of not sunsetting entire products or removing core functionality. When I worked on AppEngine, I would often see apps written 10+ years ago still chugging along. It is true though that GCP sometimes sunsets specific product functionality, requiring changes on the customers' part. Some of these are unavoidable (eg committing to apply security patches to Python 2.7 given that the rest of the world is mostly not upstreaming these patches anymore), but not all of them. I would certainly use Cloud Spanner externally now that I've left the company, and IMO spanner has such a compelling featureset that it's a strong reason to use GCP for greenfield development. The problem though is that it's only available on GCP, and could become expensive at large scale.

jerrygenser 3y ago
>It is true though that GCP sometimes sunsets specific product functionality, requiring changes on the customers' part. Some of these are unavoidable (eg committing to apply security patches to Python 2.7 given that the rest of the world is mostly not upstreaming these patches anymore), but not all of them. A good example is probably IoT. I've heard first hand anecdotes of very difficult migrations off this service.
nojvek 3y ago
My previous employer was a GCP customer. Google did pull occasional shenanigans totally breaking us with random upgrades without notifying us. Their support wouldn’t acknowledge it was their fault until we were mad at them. My newer employer is AWS. Their offerings are a lot more stable and support is helpful. If you want to build a serious business I would avoid GCP. Google doesn’t really give a shit at winning Cloud. Ads is their core business.
- weitendorf 3y ago
  Ugh I'm so sorry, you should definitely have been notified in advance about breaking changes, unless they were accidental bugs and regressions. That was something we took pretty seriously for the products I worked on. I have definitely enjoyed using AWS support. But I've also encountered some broken/janky functionality (eg using custom domain + api gateway + websockets + Lambda for the apparently niche-task of having a real website use the Lambda-websockets integration) on AWS that I don't think would have made it to production at Google. I also really dislike how they handle project-level logging compared to how it's done on GCP. Ultimately I do think some GCP products like Bigquery, Cloud Run (I'm biased here), and Spanner as well as general DevEx/reliability factors are compelling enough for GCP to be worth serious consideration, even if AWS offers better support.

jerrygenser 3y ago

>It is true though that GCP sometimes sunsets specific product functionality, requiring changes on the customers' part. Some of these are unavoidable (eg committing to apply security patches to Python 2.7 given that the rest of the world is mostly not upstreaming these patches anymore), but not all of them. A good example is probably IoT. I've heard first hand anecdotes of very difficult migrations off this service.

nojvek 3y ago

My previous employer was a GCP customer. Google did pull occasional shenanigans totally breaking us with random upgrades without notifying us. Their support wouldn’t acknowledge it was their fault until we were mad at them. My newer employer is AWS. Their offerings are a lot more stable and support is helpful. If you want to build a serious business I would avoid GCP. Google doesn’t really give a shit at winning Cloud. Ads is their core business.

weitendorf 3y ago
Ugh I'm so sorry, you should definitely have been notified in advance about breaking changes, unless they were accidental bugs and regressions. That was something we took pretty seriously for the products I worked on. I have definitely enjoyed using AWS support. But I've also encountered some broken/janky functionality (eg using custom domain + api gateway + websockets + Lambda for the apparently niche-task of having a real website use the Lambda-websockets integration) on AWS that I don't think would have made it to production at Google. I also really dislike how they handle project-level logging compared to how it's done on GCP. Ultimately I do think some GCP products like Bigquery, Cloud Run (I'm biased here), and Spanner as well as general DevEx/reliability factors are compelling enough for GCP to be worth serious consideration, even if AWS offers better support.