- Do you really want to get involved with anything Google given their links to NSA?
- Do you really want to place company or personal resources into this product given their track history of shutting down experimental, and not even experimental technologies (as this is)?
(or Maybe it is time to take off my tin-foil hat. I don't know about that, I just know I am deeply disappointed with Google)
Question #1 isn't really relevant for serious projects.
Google is far from alone with the NSA involvement. To be safe you would have to host in a country outside the USA.
I'll assume you are not trolling and just misinformed so I'll address your 'elephants':
- Google already said that there are no "links": http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/jun/19/google...
- Statistical analysis of Google closures shows that they deprecate products at below industry pace, so your impression about that is also wrong: http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
'We do push back where we can, and do everything we can to protect our users’ data. But we don’t write the laws.'
If you ever need/want/have to migrate your application elsewhere, you'd have to replicate their environment or rewrite the application.
For the kinds of applications I work on, those are deal breakers so I use AWS (which also has its limitations) or some other server hosting service instead.
I run a number of apps on Python/App Engine specifically because I don't want to deal with servers/infrastructure/scaling. Sometimes the limitations aren't ideal, but it's still a trade-off I've been happy with overall.
It seems obvious to say, but many technical decisions involve trade offs of one kind or the other. The ones that bind early and have high switching costs are worth thinking through at some depth.
Everyone I know is bailing out on "the cloud". Even non-technical people.
This is like slapping a child round the face and offering them an ice cream straight away afterwards.
