Will Google guarantee a minimum number of years to support this platform? I would hate to dedicate time and resources to this (sounds pretty useful) and then have Google shut this down in the near future.
Hi. I manage App Engine (the original "serverless" product at Google).
This is a very understandable concern, given the importance of having a platform on which you can rely.
Contractually Google Cloud provides a 1 year notice before discontinuing (or making backwards incompatible changes) to products. This is for generally available (GA) products. Cloud Run is in beta, so technically it could be decided not to bring it to GA. This is why some conservative orgs tend to wait for products to be GA before releasing them.
From a technical perspective, Cloud Run was designed to be highly portable and idiomatic. If the service were discontinued (or you just didn't like it), you should be able to take your container image, and run it anywhere else. Odds are you would be using some other Google Cloud Services, so you would likely want to run in an environment with low network latency to Google Cloud (Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine being obvious candidates).
From a historical perspective, I'd say that Google Cloud goes above and beyond in supporting older products. App Engine is about to hit its 11th anniversary. We are still running PHP 5.5 apps and backporting security patches to the runtime, despite the language losing community support 3 years ago. We are still turning down an old product called "Managed Virtual Machines", which has now been in a deprecated (but running) state for longer than it was GA!
From an emotional perspective, I think that Google is eyed with a lot of suspicion for turning off products. Google Reader - enough said. But as someone on the thread pointed out, Google Cloud is a very different business from the rest of Google. Google (!cloud) is a consumer company at a scale where if a product matters when it hits a billion users. Google Cloud is an enterprise company. Scale still matters, but not in the same way it does in consumer.
I can't wait for hacker news folks to try Cloud Run. Its an awesome product.
We usually extend the deprecation timeline if a product is important or is hard to migrate.
Master/Slave datastore deprecation takes 3 years since the announcement of deprecation.
Python2.5, 4 years since deprecation announcement to fully deprecated.
Java 6 was officially deprecated in July 2017 but if you still have an app deployed in Java 6, chances are they can still serve traffic just fine. Same applies to Java 7 (this is partially due to JVM backward compatibility but there are non-trivial engineer works involved)
I hope this gives you some confidence in Google's cloud offering.
Cloud Run is in beta, so technically it could be decided not to bring it to GA. This is why some conservative orgs tend to wait for products to be GA before releasing them.
Ah that's one reason not to use GCP betas. Another big one is the complete lack of any public uptime target. In my opinion, this makes the betas nearly as bad as alphas with respect to using them in production.
That's precisely the point: don't use Betas in production, unless you're okay with that. Do you have a suggestion on wording for the help text to reiterate that more clearly?
The background here is that a Beta product is still in flux. In particular, it might not be GA yet because it hasn't yet met its internal SLO for enough time, proving that it can consistently meet the SLO for its SLA.
While we could let products ship randomly, since SLAs "just" mean we pay you if we don't meet them, we choose not to. Customers expect that if a product says "this is our SLO/SLA" that we intend to hit that.
We hear you though; we don't like super long Beta durations any more than you do. Sometimes though, we reached Beta and didn't realize we hadn't met the quality bar we wanted.
Really depends our your capacity for risk. If you're a small startup team, getting the benefit of automatic scaling with extremely little management overhead (especially compared to something like Kubernetes) could be worth the lack of explicit uptime SLAs.
It is an important question, but Google services which are largely consumer-based and no cost are a very different world from Google Cloud. People get a lot of Internet Cool Guy points these days from falsely conflating the two.
I'm not the to make commitments but our history has been solid, and our deprecation policy is embedded in our terms of service for every Cloud user.
The only product I can remember us deprecating in GCP was Prediction API in favor of the much-preferred Cloud Machine Learning Engine, and with that came communication to every single affected admin and a _year_ before cut-off.
Uh, just last year Google increased the price of developers using the maps API by an order of magnitude with no grandfathering policy, which for many users was effectively shutting the API off completely.
It's not just the consumer side; Google doesn't exactly have a spotless reputation for developers, and assuming the post must be somebody faking being concerned for "Internet Cool Guy points" is just tone deaf.
If nothing else, what do you expect Google to say? "No, we'll definitely be dropping this"?
The services that Google dropped were either big bets that ended up as massive failures in the marketplace (e.g. wave, google+) or services that were neither big nor strategic to google (e.g. google reader, google code).
GCP is neither.
If you're not convinced by the fact that Google has been pouring billions into Google Cloud for over 10 years now, organizes multi-day conferences promoting it, launches new features monthly, then no rational argument will convince you that they won't drop GCP because they also dropped google reader.
Google Cloud has had zero dead products in a decade existence. Just because Google phased out a couple browser extensions and a RSS feed reader doesn't mean they have a "horrendous track record" when it comes to real enterprise-tier services such as Cloud.
It's not the dead products on my case I fear but the lockdown of a Gmail account, there's already 2 gmail accounts I can't access despite knowing the password. I would not use GCP just because of that, everything might work fine and then one day you're locked out of your account and can't do anything.
Just had this with an account I setup for my parents. I have recovery email AND know when account was created - not good enough. My parents use a landline that can't get a text and apparently enough to deny them (Google won't Dona voice call). Would pay 50 to unlock. Only option is to setup a new account. Ugh. This same email used for Apple Id and they like their Apple stuff
I'm in the exact same situation, I know everything about those accounts, password & recovery email but that's not good enough. Why would I trust Google with GCP when I have personal experience that those accounts can and will be locked down without a valid reason? That does not seem a good business idea.
Does anyone have a head-to-head comparison of Google vs Amazon vs Apple cancellations? I guess the Facebook equivalent would be what of our personal information they've newly managed to monetize.
