Knock on wood, I have not used them in quite a while.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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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.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
That website shows how much Google buys up and then shuts down, centralising it's power even more.
Nah, because there are definitely projects Google started on there. The one OP mentioned is on there, and I remember Google Zeitgeist from back when.
EDIT: Not saying that this is comprehensive, but only five entries reference being acquired from elsewhere in their description.
I didn't mean that every single Google product is a acquisition, just a LOT of them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet
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.
I'm not arguing that Google should have kept them going.
But I think that it might be fair to say that Google did start a number of projects and then cancel them -- even if sensibly -- and that for people who start to rely on them, that's frustrating.
In some cases, like with Google Labs stuff, it was very explicit that anything there was experimental and not something that Google was committing to. If one relied on it, well, that's kind of their fault.
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.
Right? Who the fuck created this standard? You'll arrive at a doc trying to figure out how to get somewhere and it'll tell you everything except for how to actually get there. It'll finally have a link with the link text being the name of the section you're trying to find, but noooo... It doesn't actually link there, it links to a second document explaining the fucking history of that section, why they named it what they did, the engineer's dog's puppy's name, and anything else to fluff out the doc without actually being useful. Why in the hell would you write a doc about an interface and not link to the relevant interface? I guess it's probably because they completely rebuilt the way that website interfaces work and you can't actually bookmark or deep link to anything. You always end up at the same page regardless of what you bookmark and then you have to manually navigate there. They took all the wonderful working features of the internet and broke them, then made alternatives that are 1000x worse.
I'm so happy, I'm not alone anymore... this frustration was a constant dread that I felt alone, and I feel like we're two lost souls, wandering the plane of Google's terrible documentation, lost forever looking for the json schema for the API we need, constantly searching, never finding it.
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.
In my opinion AWS is considerably more clear and simple than gcloud.
They're both very complex so it's understandable people would have different experiences. In general I've found GCP fairly straightforward, with shitty documentation, generally good support of fundamentals, great k8s support, good prices, fairly modern APIs, and relatively low feature coverage. AWS more built out, awful & totally inconsistent UI, better feature coverage, higher prices, and some pretty janky XML APIs if memory serves.
Hope they didn't instead pick the security shitshow over at Azure.
Actually you meant compliance, security has other random stuff. /s