Sure it makes business sense for Google to do this, but you've gotta admit to having that same reservation for every new Google service.
Would you build a business model that relies on a brand new Google service?
Hell no - give it a few years, and wait to see if the "customer support" consists of hundreds of other suckers who've gone all-in complaining to each other on the public forums, with not even the original 20% time Gooogler bothering to read or respond to anything...
It's just happened too often. (And I know Nest and Revolv aren't "Google" as such, but they're definitely run by "Googlers" and are under the same adult supervision, so it's not even like you can say "sure, they _used_ to be like that...")
I felt like this about Google services for a long time now. However, we decided to go with GCE for some of our recent / less critical work and to be honest, I've been really happy.
We had decent support and even our requests through non official channels like slack communities or direct emails got responded / followed up. Services seem as stable as AWS. And most of the tooling is better.
I think they are doing a great work recently on Google Cloud. Granted, we built everything with "moving to AWS should be easy / possible in case Google fucks something up really bad" in mind, which proves your point. But locking in does not scare me more than it does about locking in to AWS at this stage.
Based on your slack channel comment, I assume you're using Kubernetes. That's a great choice for new development, and I'm glad you've had your questions answered! I can't tell though, did you also use one of our paid support tiers? (https://cloud.google.com/support).
I got burned by App Engine so I get the vibe but frankly a bot could post this same argument on every Google thread and it wouldn't move the needle one way or the other.
Would I put containers on Google Cloud in return for free upload bandwidth to YouTube and use their CDN because it was easy? You bet your ass I would. If you can't tell the difference between a novelty thermostat and a major, long-term, strategic corporate investment then you've got bigger problems than switching DNS entries for a CDN.
