Why I distrust Google Cloud more than AWS or Azure.

You should be careful with who you will depend upon. Most business can't rationally avoid picking a cloud provider option - and that often means choosing between AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

For any substantial deployment, planning on having a hard dependency on numerous Google Cloud services should in my opinion make you very unconfortable - the smart way of taking advantage of their offering is to focus on base VMs and other services from which you can easily migrate away if needed. I listed the key reasons below.

The often brilliant Steve Yegge on this - make sure you read it entirely - it is both fun and very informative: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc [ archive ].

Choice quote where Steve translates a Google Cloud communication from PR-Speak into English:

Dear RECIPIENT,

Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem.

We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year.

Please go fuck yourself,

All in all, the situations Google puts developers into remind me of the classic fire and motion article by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ [ archive ]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609 - Here is a company that found their cloud service suddenly disabled - with a full outage affecting all customers happening! - because Google payments incorrectly flagged their payment as a possible fraud. To make things nicer they received a threatening communication warning that if this was not resolved in 3 days everything (along with presumably their business) would be erased …

While I had my share of trouble with other service providers, such a level of piss-poor customer service is unthinkable coming from serious cloud service providers.

Quote from: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud [ archive ]

The clock is ticking for Google Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft-currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share-or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter.

While this might or not be true, Google does have a strong reputation of wantonly killing products (see https://killedbygoogle.com/ [ archive ]). And even if Google Cloud continues to exist, nothing guarantees the particular service you depend upon will.

The discussion of this article under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609 [ archive ] is also very interesting.