Dr Seuss books were recently recalled and remade to be less racist and to remove insensitive imagery. Bernstein Bears books all got replaced by Berenstein Bears books, so it's clearly not impossible to do.
An estimate, not a guarantee, and just bring in a FLIR/thermal camera to see where the heats getting lost and how much. They're cheap enough for professional use these days.
There are no silver bullets for whole system reliability, but high-availability clustered databases was this wiz bang thing that greatly improved the reliability of your database, back in the day. It didn't come cheap, and there were growing pains, but sometimes the available technology does make a difference.
There was a brief moment in 1999 when this tiny startup came on the scene and introduced a search engine that was so much better that all the rest of them functionally died off. Before SEO bots destroyed a lot of that particular search engine's results, it made the Internet feel much more organized, and just typing in what you wanted made it quite easy to navigate! It's now a quarter century later and Google Search has plenty of critics, but for one brief moment in history, the act of finding things on the Internet took a giant leap forwards.
Backend simplicity also means a more shallow moat. It makes it easier for Digital Ocean/Linode (Akamai)/Hetzner to offer a competing service with the same backend knobs to turn, should they decide they want to get into that market.
The goal should be to make the backend as simple as possible, but no simplier. Complexity here leads to operational burden and toil. But that's why you hire good SREs and treat them well. What's more important is frontend complexity, aka how difficult it is for customers to use. Backend and frontend complexity aren't necessarily linked, which, imo, fly.io achieves,
downtime aside.
The difference between (free) Gmail and Google workspace is that workspace is a paid product. If you're big enough to warrant an AM, you can get terms which include continuity of business planning if Google does happen to shut down Workspace. (They won't.)
Can you help me in a detailed sense - what did you tell customers? did you literally say there's product is "completely over-engineered by a bunch of intellectual engineers with no focus, no discipline, and no oversight"? That seems a little over-honest to me but of course I wasn't there.
It's more about Heroku dropping free and low-cost plans, which is them demonstrating that they don't currently care about three low end of the market, more than any specfic feature.
Where does the misalignment between what the customer thinks they want, and what they actually want fit in to your philosophy? Google Spanner is a great example of this because who doesn't want instantaneous global writes? It's just that, y'know, there's a ton of businesses, especially smaller ones, that don't actually need that. The smarter customers realize this themselves, and can judge the premium they'd pay for Spanner over something far less complex. What I'm getting to is that sales is a critical company function to bridge the gap between what customers want, and what customers actually need, and for you to make money.
The first releases of EBS weren't very good and took a while to get to where we are. Some places still avoid using EBS due to bad experience back in 2011 when it was first released.