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Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

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Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#101

This is starting to feel like the Windows platform post MFC/Win32. Every couple years, it was a new initiative to get developers and the middle management deciders revved up. A sort of a “we’re building it so that you’ll come, right?” thing. And then a year or so later, a new initiative replaced it, the offering was dramatically watered down, or just altogether sunset’ed.

In their defence at least MFC/Win32 is still patched and supported even if it's not getting new features.

Although it's probably not the same because they don't have to run any physical hardware to keep it going like IoT Cloud needs.

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#102
post #86

Well that's hilarious. And here I was always told that Google Cloud was supposed to be the one that didn't kill services.

Wait what? That’s like the opposite of what everyone here says. Like, Google has a bad reputation for doing this.

Sure, Google at large has a reputation for randomly axing products, but a frequent defense I see in such threads is something like "sure it might kill consumer products, but GCP is a different thing aimed at Enterprise that wouldn't do that". (I say that I see this argued, not that I hold the position myself.)

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#103

I don't work for Google or really care, but the GCP bashing dogpile every time they cancel a product is just getting pretty unimaginative. They offer hundreds to thousands of services, and some bets just don't work out. Glad to see many other people have perfectly functioning crystal balls.

They are free to shut down their services whenever they want - but good luck trying to win sales if they keep doing this. Especially given their reputation.

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#104
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is IoT a hobbyist business? I deployed a large restaurant equipment project on Azure backends and couldn't be happier. I've made a policy of not touching Google for anything embedded-related and it continues to pay off. I guess, yeah, anything non-AdWords related is a hobby. For Google .

They didn't say IoT is a hobbyist business. They said no serious company in their right mind would use a Google IoT product, so the only market they have is the hobbyists who aren't deterred by the fact that Google only keeps these services around for a couple of years before shutting down.

Yes, correct. I probably could have phrased that more clearly. Sorry. :-(

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#105

Google should just go ahead and shut down their entire Cloud business. I mean, nobody in their right mind would build a business or anything substantial on top of any Google provided service, and the hobbyist market can't be that big. Just go ahead and drop out Google, and quit fucking wasting everybody's time.

Are you aware Snapchat has a two billion dollar contract with GCP? GCP isn't some rinky dink hobby computer company.

GCP isn't some rinky dink hobby computer company.

So they suckered one big company into signing a deal with them. Hell, maybe they even suckered a handful into doing so. But there are good reasons that Google is barely (if that) playing on the same level as AWS or Azure. Last I saw they had about 10% of the cloud computing market, compared to well over 50% for AWS and Azure combined. And I don't think it's any kind of stretch to suggest that Google's reputation for lacking long-term commitment to its products is one of those reasons.

And make no mistake... I take no glee or joy in saying this. I was a google fanboy (like many people my age) for quite a few years after Google first came along. And I'm still a fan on many levels. I don't want Google to fail, I just think they are going to fail (at selling to the enterprise at least) if they keep displaying the behaviors they keep displaying. Now the Search and Adwords businesses might sustain them indefinitely, so I don't expect them to go out of business. But as far as selling SaaS services, especially ones targeted at enterprise users, it's clear that Google just does not "get it." And I doubt they ever will. So unless they're going to find a way to change that state of affairs, I suggest they just exit this line of business. It would be easier for everybody, IMO.

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#106
This doesnt surprise me, I wrote about this not long ago and how the Cloud Providers are only paying basic lip service to MQTT and IoT. There is not one single Cloud Provider that implements MQTTv5 properly (Azure implements a subset of it), and considering it came out in 2019 after being in "close to final draft" status for several years before that, the clouds have been very slow to pick this up.

I refuse to believe that anyone is actually using IoT Core on AWS or GCP for modern MQTT workloads. Pulling data in from a few "things" - sure, but industrial level capability across multiple systems, I really don't see it.

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has never discontinued one of their services? Not trolling, seriously asking (I don't use hyperscalers)

To the best of my knowledge, no. At least none of the AWS services I've used. They've deprecated support for some CAs and stuff, but that seems reasonable.

Not a full service but partial features like S3 Bittorrent support was removed.

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#108

Google should just go ahead and shut down their entire Cloud business. I mean, nobody in their right mind would build a business or anything substantial on top of any Google provided service, and the hobbyist market can't be that big. Just go ahead and drop out Google, and quit fucking wasting everybody's time.

Unfortunately they have this weird dichotomy where they have some of the most outstanding and ahead of the curve cloud services that make it worth it. This IoT Core thing is a shit show and I imagine they will introduce a partner who will do it instead of them.

But there is nothing like BigQuery on the market elsewhere, Cloud Run and PubSub are standout services that others have tried to emulate and haven't got near it, plus everything on GCP doesn't feel like either an afterthought (AWS) or a cobbling together of mismanaged and old-version open source services (AWS & Azure).

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I prefer to invest time and effort on AWS. I know I won't have to rewrite everything from scratch whenever Google feels like abandoning their projects.

AWS has never discontinued one of their services? Not trolling, seriously asking (I don't use hyperscalers)

Yes: Amazon Sumerian.

Re: Google IoT Core will be discontinued on Aug. 16, 2023

#110

I'm in the process of migrating PrintNanny.ai's remote command/event system off Cloud IoT Core. I've been running on IoT Core for 1.5 years. Here's my breakdown of the costs... - $236.99 in usage, approx 1% of project's total revenue - ~20 hours to implement pub/sub applications running on a mix of Raspberry Pi & GCP VMs. Implementations were in Rust and Python. It would have taken much, much longer to stand up a man…

NATS doesn't support MQTTv5 so for serious MQTT usage it is still useless unfortunately.
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