Still raw from a gaming platform we built for progress/matchup on App Engine (GAE) early on in 2011 for a popular racing matchup game. We chose App Engine due to flexibility, scaling and price.
One day Google increased prices and our costs went up x5-x10 on AppEngine [1][2]. We then had to move to AWS over the next few weeks early on in launch. It caused push back on other projects and was generally a bad time that wasn't necessary.
That isn't the way to build trust and we have used AWS and now Azure more than Google Cloud for this reason in the decade since.
Google has great tools, but you simply cannot do shock pricing on the cloud, it is the biggest fear of everyone that uses the cloud or has to recommend it. Google made us look bad by choosing them over AWS, later we also use Azure.
We like to build our systems for horizontal scaling, on cheaper machines, we weren't even doing much but it was suddenly out of budget and left everyone feeling burned by Google. I love Google and their tools, but they have to be careful with the rug pulling and knee capping people that choose large projects to develop on their products and platforms.
Don't make people look bad for choosing your product and especially don't surprise people with pricing or dropping products. If it was a better planned price increase we could have taken time to move off more slowly or even optimized to run on it, but since it was so sudden it was shocking. Since that moment they have lost lots of projects to Google Cloud that would have gone there.
We literally never expected it because AWS was a force, Azure was still new, and we thought Google would be price competitive to AWS and Azure while looking to gain customers trust as cloud products were something that didn't seem like you'd want to do any drastic changes to customers as they can be long term customers if things go well.
One day Google increased prices and our costs went up x5-x10 on AppEngine [1][2]. We then had to move to AWS over the next few weeks early on in launch. It caused push back on other projects and was generally a bad time that wasn't necessary.
That isn't the way to build trust and we have used AWS and now Azure more than Google Cloud for this reason in the decade since.
Google has great tools, but you simply cannot do shock pricing on the cloud, it is the biggest fear of everyone that uses the cloud or has to recommend it. Google made us look bad by choosing them over AWS, later we also use Azure.
We like to build our systems for horizontal scaling, on cheaper machines, we weren't even doing much but it was suddenly out of budget and left everyone feeling burned by Google. I love Google and their tools, but they have to be careful with the rug pulling and knee capping people that choose large projects to develop on their products and platforms.
Don't make people look bad for choosing your product and especially don't surprise people with pricing or dropping products. If it was a better planned price increase we could have taken time to move off more slowly or even optimized to run on it, but since it was so sudden it was shocking. Since that moment they have lost lots of projects to Google Cloud that would have gone there.
We literally never expected it because AWS was a force, Azure was still new, and we thought Google would be price competitive to AWS and Azure while looking to gain customers trust as cloud products were something that didn't seem like you'd want to do any drastic changes to customers as they can be long term customers if things go well.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2011/09/02/google_app_engine_use...
[2] https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/09/app-engine-price-hike/