Can I ask (given the summary / roadmap at the end and your blog post about GCE's pricing): Are you moving to Google Cloud? If not, why not?
For what it's worth, I agree with you that a lot of the value of Container Engine comes from having a team ensure the bits all work together. That should be (one of) the positives of any managed service, but I think the Container Engine team has done a particularly good job in a fast moving and often bumpy space.
We have stuff that must stay on AWS, too dangerous to make a move now :(
We'll ignore the "switch to auto scaling" bit. Teammates have already started testing CoreOS & Kubernetes (on AWS) while I was writing the article. We'll figure it out and get it in production soon, hopefully.
We have a subsidiary which has no locking on AWS and could use an infra refreshing. They already have google accounts and use one or two products. They'll be moved to GCE in the coming months, hopefully.
Thanks for the reply; we'll see you as you get out of the lockin (feel free to ping me via email if you've got anything specific).
Why drop autoscaling though? Note that you can use Autoscaling Groups with Kubernetes on EC2: https://github.com/kubernetes/contrib/blob/master/cluster-au... and the team would happily take bug reports (either as GH Issues or just yelling at them on slack/IRC).
It seems that doing auto scaling or doing kubernetes may take similar amount of work (in our current state of affairs). We want kubernetes on the long term so we might as well go straight to it.
I suppose that auto scaling will be back on the table later, to auto scale kubernetes instances. Maybe.
Based on past discussions on HN and I feel google has huge terrible support for it's offerings. May be it will improve with time. But currently I am really concerned with running GCP in production.
As others (including downthread) have pointed out, Google definitely has a bad overall support reputation, but that's because nearly every (traditional) Google service is free and lacks this structured support model. Just like Cloud, if you're even a moderately large Ads customer, you get pretty good support!
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and want your business ;).
I wonder if the problem is more that Google has got terrible support for it's free offerings - maybe for justifiable business reasons. However the damage to their brand when they want to sell business critical services is an unintended consequence. (Similarly I think killing Reader was justifiable from their perspective but the damage to their reputation amongst a vociferous and possibly influential demographic has probably outweighed the cost of keeping it going... They can't launch a service without someone popping up to remind us about Reader)
I miss Reader (though I'm amused that it let Feedly take off, and they're a Cloud customer!).
One thing often not considered ("Why not just have someone keep it running?") is that you really have to keep a team of people on it (in case there's a CVE or something) or at least familiar enough with the code to fix it. There's also the double standard of "you haven't added new features in forever!" (Maybe this wouldn't have applied to Reader though).
But, I agree if we could have kept it on life support somehow, we wouldn't have (as many) people asking "What if they shut down Cloud?!?". Conveniently, as people get a sense of how serious Google Cloud is about this business, even on HN I'm seeing this less.
For what it's worth, I agree with you that a lot of the value of Container Engine comes from having a team ensure the bits all work together. That should be (one of) the positives of any managed service, but I think the Container Engine team has done a particularly good job in a fast moving and often bumpy space.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud ;).