Thats so interesting to me, I always assume companies like google who have "unlimited" dollars will always be happy to eat the cost to keep customers, especially given gcp usage outside googles internal services is way smaller compared to azure and aws. Also interesting to see snapchat had a hacky solution with AppEngine
These are the best additional bits of information that I can find to share with you if you're curious to read more about Snap and what they did. (They were spending $400m per year on GCP which was famously disclosed in their S-1 when they IPO'd)
The "unlimited dollars" come from somewhere after all.
GCP is behind in market share, but has the incredible cheat advantage of just not being Amazon. Most retailers won't touch Amazon services with a ten foot pole, so the choice is GCP or Azure. Azure is way more painful for FOSS stacks, so GCP has its own area with only limited competition.
I’m not sure what you mean by Azure being more painful for FOSS stacks. That is not my experience. Old you elaborate?
However I have seen many people flee from GCP because: Google lacks customer focus, Google is free about killing services, Google seems to not care about external users, people plain don’t trust Google with their code, data or reputation.
Customers would rather choose Azure. GCP has a bad rep, bad documentation, bad support compared to AWS / Azure. & with google cutting off products, their trust is damaged.
Google does not give even a singular fuck about keeping their customers. They will happily kill products that are actively in use and are low-effort for... convenience? Streamlining? I don't know, but Google loves to do that.