Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices(googledevelopers.blogspot.com) |
Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices(googledevelopers.blogspot.com) |
They may have, I admit, but I can't think of any. The point is raising the standard Google Reader/Google Buzz/etc. free examples isn't really apropos.
All serious development has slowed down to a crawl. New developments are mostly cosmetic. Bugs never get fixed. Microsoft, miles behind not so long ago is now streets ahead with Office 365, and Google has quite clearly stopped giving a crap.
Google has never shown any interest in the long term pursuit of any product or service that couldn't be sufficiently exploited for advertising, directly or indirectly (collecting data to sell to advertisers), paid or unpaid.
As far as I know, never. I've been compiling a list of live and shut down services/products/etc (~299 so far), and while payment doesn't seem to be an important factor (plenty of shut down paid things, including many more advertising services than I expected), I cannot name a service which was under heavy development and was shut down during said development. However, I think that is just because development tends to stop before the final death knell. Reader, for example, used to regularly update and improve during its heyday.
Here's another review though: http://www.stackdriver.com/gce-cassandra/
Ohwait...
Going all in in Google an then Google deciding that their latest experiment is not worth their time is painful. It will most likely ruin the start-up. This may seem as an emotional knee-jerk reaction to Reader, but it's the reality. You cannot throw 100 things against the wall, ask people to invest time and money on them and then drop all but a few of them. Trust is gone, fool me once and all...
"For App Engine, leaving Preview will include providing all paid users a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, billing via invoice, a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards businesses, and a new, easier to understand usage-based pricing structure for App Engine that is in line with the value App Engine provides. It will also reaffirm our deprecation policy whereby we will support deprecated versions of product APIs for 3 years, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to function."
A quick comparison of the TOS shows that Compute Engine doesn't have the same policy, but IANAL, so I could be missing something.
Compute Engine also isn't really in the same realm of worry as App Engine, for some, at least. Most of what you're getting is immediately migrateable if it's going to be shut down, as opposed to app engine, where there are some migration paths to similar stacks, but no flip-a-switch path to converting existing code and data to a "standard" stack (at least from my understanding. I haven't tried compute engine).
sure there was a couple of months of it being pricier nowhere near 5000% though.
Like when we ported to 2.7 from 2.5. Which was the biggest win in regards to reduction in cost AND latency.
another win was moving to ndb
and another win was offloading a lot of work to backends once they were introduced.
also, support is better than other vendors I've dealt with throughout the years including microsoft. An answer < 24 hours from someone who acts like they know whats going on is always appreciated.
I'm far from Google's biggest fan but I wouldn't depend on any platform remaining over a 5 year period and would instead avoid lock in. For example Heroku in convenient for Rails but it should only be a few days to a couple of weeks to migrate to raw AWS any other hosting solution if required. This may mean limiting the use of the additional features and services integrated with Heroku.
Providing portability was possible (and I haven't looked into this service so it may not be simple) if I was a VC startup my bigger worry would be that Google would have too much information about my operations, scale and growth that I would prefer they didn't have until I chose to give it to them.
Shame on you if you walk into something with half/no plan. Price should never be your single (or top) motivator for service selection; ESPECIALLY with something as crucial as a business dependency like IaaS.
The idea is to try to predict future shut downs, but it's turned out to be a lot more work than I expected...
It doesn't mean those will not happen again.