Actually, most of the time we say "in the cloud" rather than naming a specific hosting provider. Definitely Amazon has the first mover advantage and accumulated reputation first, but it's hardly unassailable.
Still... I think the bigger problem isn't whether or not Google plans topull the plug or not, but that it has a reputation of pulling plugs to such an extent that people factor that into a decision of using their services.
When it's something as big a choice as a cloud provider that can cast a long shadow over their offerings.
In addition, I remain cloud agnostic as well. As a student, I stick to whichever platforms can give some free credits. At the moment I have some cloud infra on google and some on aws.
That’s a good thing not to tie in to proprietary api’s, indeed every cloud provider is doing it and after Google’s recent management shuffle to bring in management from Oracle making them alike.
Try using apache-libcloud to make your deployment and programs cloud agnostic. Also try using smaller alternatives like hetzner or scaleway.
Once you go down this cloud rabbit hole you will be hold hostage to whims of these providers, where they can shutdown any service at their will or ask to pay an arm and leg. Also try to have non USA cloud providers as another backup option in the long run.
Still... I think the bigger problem isn't whether or not Google plans topull the plug or not, but that it has a reputation of pulling plugs to such an extent that people factor that into a decision of using their services.
When it's something as big a choice as a cloud provider that can cast a long shadow over their offerings.