We’re writing to let you know that Google Cloud’s IoT Core Service will be discontinued on August 16, 2023 at which point your access to the IoT Core Device Manager APIs will no longer be available. As of that date, devices will be unable to connect to the Google Cloud IoT Core MQTT and HTTP bridges and existing connections will be shut down.
Your current IoT Core Services will remain available through August 15, 2023, unless you terminate your usage of IoT Core at an earlier date.
What do I need to do? We recommend that you take action early to migrate from IoT Core to an alternative service. As an initial step, connect with your Google Cloud account manager if you have questions about your migration plans. Your account manager can also help you learn more about Google Cloud partners that offer alternative IoT technology or implementation services that meet your business requirements.
Over the next year, we will continue to reach out with additional information to support you during your migration.
—The Google Cloud IoT Core Product Team
Dear RECIPIENT,
Fuck yooooouuuuuuuu. Fuck you, fuck you, Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore. So drop your fucking plans and go start digging through our shitty documentation, begging for scraps on forums, and oh by the way, our new shit is COMPLETELY different from the old shit, because well, we fucked that design up pretty bad, heh, but hey, that’s YOUR problem, not our problem.
We remain committed as always to ensuring everything you write will be unusable within 1 year.
Please go fuck yourself,
Google Cloud Platform
[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
[..] in the Google world, deprecation means: “We are breaking our commitments to you.” It really does.
That’s what it ultimately means. It means they are going to force you to do some work, possibly a large
amount of rework, on a regular basis, as punishment for doing what they told you to do originally — as
punishment for listening to their glossy marketing on their website: Better software. Faster! You do
everything they tell you to do, and you launch your application or service, and then, bang, a year or
two later it breaks down.
[1]: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-...
Because while they are natively supported on the device, they aren't tied to Android's future.
A Coursera class on Google IoT Core for industrial control started today. 77,000 people signed up.
I think the people that still think Stadia is gonna shut down any time soon are just the gamer blogs/communities that have been running shutdown rumor pieces every month or so for the last 3 years. (Most recently the killedbygoogle guy's "my friend heard on facebook that Stadia's shutting down..." post that went viral.)
Stadia's actively signing hardware deals with Samsung/LG and other smart TV manufacturers, and about to expand availability to even more countries. AFAICT most people that actually play on Stadia don't think it'll shut down any time soon.
Hopefully they'll learn that if it's locked down to being tied to one person's cloud it's likely to become a paperweight in a few years.
That’s actually just a Coursera marketing tactic. Most of their courses are not real-time and are self-paced content.
So, they act like they are starting the course “Today” every day, and the 77k enrolled is the # of enrolled users forever since the course has been offered. Totally misleading!
If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely have no future in any enterprise product ever again.
I do expect them to aggressively trim small products from the cloud lineup that aren't worth the engineering investment. IoT clouds were a popular thing for several months and then people realized there wasn't a huge market or tons of profit.
This was my second biggest fear after waking up to a ransomware attack.
It's hard to imagine anyone trusting Google for IoT again. I will certainly put them at the bottom of my list for any other infrastructure I develop against in the future, and ensure that we have a documented exit strategy should it come to pass.
The idea of having just one year to develop against a new IoT core, test it, update all deployed devices, and then coordinate logistics and budget to do truck rolls when things invariably go wrong is really grinding my gears.
I feel for all of the startups having to deal with this. To the folks who are invariably scrambling, I really hope you either got advanced notice, or you're getting an extension far beyond what is publicized. Edit: The more I think about this, the more I want to believe there must be contracts in place for certain customers that extend the lifetime of this product beyond what is public. There must be.
IoT is not an easy business. Designing and programming hardware is hard. Supply chains are hard. Maintaining working inventory is hard. Building logistics networks for installation and maintenance is hard. Courting and explaining to investors why you don't have the profit margins of a pure SaaS business is hard. Relying on your cloud provider to give you more than 1 year notice should be the easy part.
This is a reflection of AWS being "customer obsessed" where Google is not.
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/volkswagen-vid...
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.
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.
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).
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.
2017 + 5 = 2022 :-P
https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spen...
Google has a long history of experimenting with a product and then shutting down once they've learned enough. Maybe they learn it's not as lucrative, maybe they learn how to build the tech, maybe they learn they're too late, whatever. But it's experimental and the experiment doesn't prove to be the "next billion users" so it wanes and then dies.
Not every product is like that. Cloud isn't just some product on a spreadsheet next to IoT Core. The heavy players like Cloud, YouTube, Ads, etc, have massive investment, have dedicated CEOs, and are in it for the long haul.
Google's deprecation policy sucks, but it doesn't apply to every product uniformly.
- $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.
Once we see legit demand we will make sure it's supported.
I'm also not confident that the constant churn of keeping up with API changes (if not outright deprecations like this) and costs of the third-party services end up costing you more than just doing it yourself.
Finally, what we've seen with Okta, Twilio, most recently MailChimp (which was used to attempt to attack DigitalOcean customers among others) clearly shows that these companies aren't magic and may not actually be any better than doing it yourself when it comes to security.
I suppose the problem is that it's hard to evalute the total cost of ownership. Migration to a 3rd party and operations costs can be reasonably forecasted, but how do you evaluate business or product continuity risk? Without being able to evaluate that risk, the 3rd party service always seems artifically "cheap."
Can you buy insurance against vendors dropping their services? I've licensed some tech before that included statements that if the company were to go out of business, the code would be open sourced so as to not leave people high and dry.
One issue is that the bigger you become, the more interesting you are as a target to break. So if you're a small company using a big company as a vendor, you've probably introduced a weaker link.
But if you're still small as a SaaS, trust is an issue to acquiring customers. I'm wondering where the sweetspot is.
Running your own servers isn’t that important and probably isn’t what makes you different. EC2, Azure VMs or whatever short term project Google is running for compute are all extremely comparable, and you loose very little by using them.
But if your business is owning and operating an IoT platform for your customers, you should invest in a high quality solution, not just buying the off-the-shelf tool. It may be that a provider’s offering is better than what you can do, but it better be a lot better if you use it.
The point is to invest heavily in what actually makes a difference, vertically integrate what matters, externalize what doesn’t.
When my doorbell (Doorbird) goes off at home the following happens:
* A real chime sounds (battery backed, mains powered, no internet required) * Native app goes ape shit and twitters (often about two hours later) * Home Assistant app kicks in on queue and does what I tell it to: Speakers speak, SMS sent etc
while google cloud as a whole i dont see going away, individual products within it(like iot core) are gonna always be up for the chopping block
Source on this?
Also, Amazon was just an eCommerce store before AWS.
Not trolling, seriously asking (I don't use hyperscalers)
EC2 and S3 and some basic hosting stuff is fine but newer services such as AWS Glue, Athena etc are a horrendous mess for anything other than 101 type stuff.
However, I hadn’t seen anyone mention the specific Enterprise API / product designation they rolled out over a year ago to deal with this kind of thing.
If I understood things correctly when they launched it [1] the plan was to start by saying which parts of the GCP platform you could confidently rely on with the implication that the other parts you should understand you’re using products and services that haven’t proven their long term value inside of Google and as a result things like this can happen and you should plan accordingly.
As far as I know this is the first thing to go since making that announcement but I’d be happy to be corrected as well.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/new...
I've been successfully using Cloud IoT for a few years. Now I need to find an alternative. There's a vendor named ClearBlade that announced today a direct migration path, but at this point I'd rather roll my own.
The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/
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.
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.
A very big difference with Google's offerings.
Google has become an abomination and a complete denial of what software is supposed to be. It deserves to die in a ball of fire, and none of its shitty products should be spared.
Are there ‘smart’ devices that are just going to stop working unless people rewrite the firmware for a different system like AWS or Azure IoT?
The scale at which Google managed to fuck up their cloud business says a lot about their DNA.
I was so excited about AlloyDB, but the documentation is crap. After two days of setting things up and dealing with their complex network configuration I gave up. Why would they make it so complex for a new dev to try their shiny new DB? Do cloud googlers seriously not think about new user experience?
The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/
Further communication to Pub/Sub wouldn't change in any way.
IoT Core as a service has some design choices that make it attractive such as JWT token auth, and complex to optimize, such as communication pattern details.
If any of you would be interested in migrating to a fully compatible solution, give me a shout at rwarz[at]softserveinc.com since we are building one ;)
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.
Gotta love the "retired" nomenclature -- as though it has had a long, productive career and now is the normal/usual time to end.
The offer for six months of free credits as well as free technical support and more is here: https://blog.qubitro.com/migrate-from-iot-core-to-qubitro/
-This message generated by Google Graveyard service deprecation service
They said they were going full on the matter protocol but I don’t see how this will replace it fully yet.