Knock on wood, I have not used them in quite a while.
Typical of Google to shut down yet another service
I’ve full on stopped accepting new Google products, only exception being the pixel phone, but I’ll root that if they decide to drop support.
I work in development and am proud to say I have convinced 3 companies now to steer clear of GCP because of their track record.
I bet someone has made a list.
googles
Yup.
The first item on the field is a search field. The “all” category has 288 entries.
That website shows how much Google buys up and then shuts down, centralising it’s power even more.
I mean, scrolling down that list, those all make sense. I guess if Google just did what all the other companies do and silently let go of these things instead of announcing that they are ending them so that developers and users know ahead of time not to expect long term stable and support that would be one thing. Google’s development process isn’t the same as everyone else’s though and their current method of developing tandem products and then gauging success of each and then folding the best features of the less successful one into the main one is obviously not a bad methodology as we have seen. As well it’s kind of important to a company to not waste resources on projects that customers both don’t find interesting and consume more resources than they generate while at the same time serve no greater benefit to anyone as a whole. Like, what do you want them to do? Nobody needs a web browser toolbar anymore, it’s 2023. Everyone screamed at and hated the entire concept of stadia, so they ended it. GPM was a financial failure with very few users that was due for a massive code overhaul. Like damn people, chill out.
Not to mention that the cpanels, documentation, and APIs for Google Cloud look like they were written by alien robots to be consumed by alien robots. I’ve never seen any other platform or docs as confusing and pointlessly convoluted as gcloud docs.
They’re the absolute worst. Doc links will go in circles, redirecting you back to where you just were, API documentation is out of date - or worse it’s out of date and doesn’t tell you until the end of reading if it even tells you at all.
Not even mentioning how everything is in permanent “alpha” and “beta” state. Things are never finalized so they can get away with changing the definition on a whim and say “sorry it was in beta, now it’s in beta5”. I had to rewrite Pub/Sub code at least once a month because they changed their spec on that, and that was one of their “most finalized” products.
Fuck GCP, I will actively avoid jobs that code on it now. If you want enterprise customers, provide an enterprise product. This isn’t chat where you can rebuild it every year because your marketers are bored. These are enterprise products that companies depend on.
Honestly, it’s not as bad as AWS or Azure. Plus if you use k8s it’s first-in-class support, since Google came up with k8s. There is a fairly steep learning curve though.
If you’re deploying anything in cloud infra you need to make sure it’s portable between providers. Vendor lock-in is a big avoidable no-no.
