Google Cloud is terrifying to some people because of Google’s policy of axeing products all around.

Steve Yegge penned an interesting blog post about their experiences with Google deprecation both from inside google and outside google. In their case, they ran into some of the same deprecation issues outside as they saw culturally on the inside. Comparing it to AWS, there is a pretty stark difference in the deprecation policy of old technology that isn’t actively being developed on.

Deprecation isn’t the only oddity. Quota increases can be weird, too - AWS asked me to get my quota upped why and I wrote something, I don’t think they read it, and then they upped it. With Google, it was faster than AWS but I did have to talk to someone on the phone in sales. It felt weird. Perhaps it’s a way to increase touch points and push people to use more at GCP?

Google has gone on record saying that they’ll end the GCP projects if they don’t outclass Azure or AWS or the like. That’s a tall order, and would require a much heavier marketing and engineering push than I’ve been seeing. They set the deadline to 2023, so I’m sure we’ll see Google Cloud shutting down before 2025.

Who knows, though, I’ve heard rumors of folks dog-fooding Google Cloud internally. If Google Cloud could sign a deal as big as Google onto their cloud, I’m sure they’d quickly outrank AWS, right?