I imagine that wouldn't be very likely in this case—this is much less like Google's usual "let's build some random thing and see if customers like it", and instead very much in the vein of the way Amazon treats AWS: as a set of infrastructure services they themselves consume, but also happen to expose to the public.

Now, they might make it private in the future, but as long as Google are using containers for everything, I don't think the service is likely to just go unmaintained and fade away.

From what I know of Google's infrastructure, they are very unlikely to be consuming this internally, just like the rest of GCP. Just because they use containers doesn't mean they use this container repository. Just because they use Java web servers doesn't mean they use AppEngine.

Google absolutely uses App Engine internally, and many other GCP offerings as well. This is simply inaccurate.

They use the external version of App Engine to run any of their customer-facing products? Which ones? Products -- I'm not talking about marketing micro-sites.

Not Google, but Snapchat runs on AppEngine.

Ingress

> a set of infrastructure services they themselves consume, but also happen to expose to the public

So like google code then. I mean they need all that source control infrastructure anyway, so they'd never shut something like that down. Oh wait....

> very much in the vein of the way Amazon treats AWS: as a set of infrastructure services they themselves consume, but also happen to expose to the public.

Reference? I've heard (unsubstantiated but believable) rumors that the servers and system that run the amazon website are rather different from the servers and system they sell the rest of us.

Started that way; now increasingly unified.

Pull the plug out from under you? Or the rug...

Given the context, I am pretty sure that was intentional.