Google historically hasn't been very strong in the cloud services area. In the places I've worked, I'm often the only advocate for (and only user of) GCloud offerings like Cloud Run or App Engine – which are IMO much easier to use than AWS offerings.
But then Vercel leapfrogged the legacy clouds just by white-labeling and packaging their individual offerings into a nice GUI, combining basic file hosting, a Node server, a CDN, serverless, KV, DB, etc... while simultaneously building up Next.js. These days it takes only like 3-5 minutes and like two clicks to deploy a new Next (or other framework) codebase to Vercel. It all "just works" too, and is free for dev projects and $20/mo for their basic paid plan (which is enough to build off of).
The cynicism is well-deserved, IMO, when Google is so late to this space (there are many companies doing this already), so quick to sunset everything, and seemingly completely preoccupied with AI these days. After the market failure of Angular, they seemed to stop caring about boring business web apps as anything more than a side thought. It's a very risky move to launch a startup on their stack.
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Google historically hasn't been very strong in the cloud services area. In the places I've worked, I'm often the only advocate for (and only user of) GCloud offerings like Cloud Run or App Engine – which are IMO much easier to use than AWS offerings.
But then Vercel leapfrogged the legacy clouds just by white-labeling and packaging their individual offerings into a nice GUI, combining basic file hosting, a Node server, a CDN, serverless, KV, DB, etc... while simultaneously building up Next.js. These days it takes only like 3-5 minutes and like two clicks to deploy a new Next (or other framework) codebase to Vercel. It all "just works" too, and is free for dev projects and $20/mo for their basic paid plan (which is enough to build off of).
The cynicism is well-deserved, IMO, when Google is so late to this space (there are many companies doing this already), so quick to sunset everything, and seemingly completely preoccupied with AI these days. After the market failure of Angular, they seemed to stop caring about boring business web apps as anything more than a side thought. It's a very risky move to launch a startup on their stack.