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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#61

Post by gregsadetsky »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #59
mindcrime wrote: post #8

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.

That was reported in 2017 and was supposedly a five-year contract.

2017 + 5 = 2022 :-P

https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spen...

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

#62

Post by grepLeigh »

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 managed MQTT broker and identity/key management that I felt comfortable using in my own home, let alone providing to customers.

- Hundreds of hours implementing and debugging glue between GCP's Pub/Sub product, websocket-based subscribers, and MQTT subscribers/publishers.

I don't regret my decision (wouldn't have shipped otherwise), but I'm looking forward to the next phase. Here's what I'm migrating towards:

- NATs message broker. NATS supports connections via MQTT and Websocket protocols, besides NATS own protocol.

- django-nats-nkeys for org, identity, and JWT management (not production-ready, don't use this until I've been eating my own dog food for a few months) [1]

- AsyncAPI schemas [2] for core message APIs, including schemas for 3rd-party printer software events (OctoPrint, Moonraker, Repetier, etc). This will underpin PrintNanny's plugin system.

[1] https://github.com/bitsy-ai/django-nats-nkeys

[2] https://www.asyncapi.com/

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

#63

Post by Mo3 »

mindcrime wrote: post #8

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.

We've moved off GCP for exactly this reason recently. It's enough. They're probably not going to shut down the lower level infrastructure, but they simply can't be trusted.

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

#64

Post by mardifoufs »

paleotrope wrote: post #29
dark-star wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ec2 classic networking is going away this month. But that's ancient technology at this point.

In fact the last ec2 classic instances are due to be retired... by today! Though I'd bet no one waited until the very last day to migrate :)

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

#65

Post by acdha »

dekhn wrote: post #32
mindcrime wrote: post #8

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.

Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) bring in multiple billions of revenue a year from enterprise. The company invested billions in new data centers and transferred large parts of intenral technical infrastructure into cloud to build these products over a decade. If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely ha…

There’s no doubt that they have invested a lot of money but that doesn’t guarantee returns and data centers have a fair amount of cost to keep running.

The big thing I’d like is to have Google Cloud broken out as a separate business. While it’s true that shutting it down would harm them, I haven’t gotten the impression that their management are especially concerned. As an enterprise customer of both, AWS seems way more motivated not just to develop their service but also just to do things like show up. Trying to get GCP people to sell things like Anthos was surprisingly hard, like they thought it was 2005 and people would buy just because of their name.

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

#66

Post by JohnHaugeland »

neodypsis wrote: post #5
gcharris wrote: post #4

I don't know why anyone would build anything that relies on a google offering these days. What are they going to discontinue next?

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.

They just retired EC2-Classic, one of the largest services they ever had

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

#67

Post by wildfire »

psanford wrote: post #47
dekhn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) bring in multiple billions of revenue a year from enterprise. The company invested billions in new data centers and transferred large parts of intenral technical infrastructure into cloud to build these products over a decade. If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely ha…

AWS doesn't do this. AWS keeps around old deprecated services that they aren't developing new features for, in perpetuity (e.g. SimpleDB). They might not launch that service into new regions, but they will keep it around in existing regions to not break customers who depend on it. This is a reflection of AWS being "customer obsessed" where Google is not.

If they were "customer obsessed" even though they are not doing development of a service, they would lauch it anyway in all regions.

By not doing this, they make it hard for their customers to be multi-regional.

It is easy to spin "customer obsession" any way you like.

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

#68

Post by moogleii »

joezydeco wrote: post #51
mindcrime wrote: post #8

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.

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 .

I think he's saying sane businesses will stay away from GCP, leaving the hobbyists, and there aren't enough of them to sustain GCP.

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

#69

Post by TheGuyWhoCodes »

joezydeco wrote: post #51
mindcrime wrote: post #8

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.

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 .

I think the parent comment was saying that Google cloud is for hobbyist because no one in their right mind will build a business that depends on Google cloud offerings.

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

#70

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

senttoschool wrote: post #41
gregsadetsky wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article/rumor from 2018-ish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

I wouldn't put too much stock into something from 2018, which was a 3rd party report on a meeting in 2016.

The article is overblown but the point remains: if GCP doesn't stop shedding money, the business is not going to let it burn cash indefinitely on a fool's errand. There will be pull-back and we don't know what services (or regions) will be affected. This may be the first of a trend.

"Google Cloud still operating at a loss despite revenue, client wins" (https://www.ciodive.com/news/google-cloud-revenue-Q2-2022/62...). Their revenue increased but so did their losses by about the same percentage. They are still 14% behind Microsoft's marketshare. They are leaning into a niche of "data, analytics, security", which is so broad that it won't take much for their competitors with much larger market share to eat their lunch.

A year ago they said they'd be profitable by this time. A year before that they said the same thing.

It's kind of sad. All that technology and nobody wants them, like a nerd without a date.

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