For a while now, Google has supported their various Cloud Platform services on Stack Overflow, both in terms of directing developers to the site and in actually answering questions about using these services.
Apparently, they've noticed that some folks are asking questions on these services here, on Server Fault, as well - they've contacted us about adding this site as an additional resource for folks with questions that are more appropriate for this community.
Google's developer support has generally been pretty good - they're not particularly prone to dumping their garbage on us. But they raised a question about tagging, so I took some time to review the situation here:
- Two related tags already existed: google-cloud-storage and google-compute-engine
- I found two questions on two additional tags: google-cloud-sql and google-cloud-storage
- There's no tag for the platform as a whole (that is, an equivalent to SO's google-cloud-platformgoogle-cloud-platform).
I have decidedly mixed feelings about adding a google-cloud-platform tag. It seems overly-broad to me; better to have tags for specific services. However, there may be some administrative functions that are common to the platform as a whole, and y'all already have the even more broad google tag which may be where such questions are ending up now. FWIW, our Google contact's concern is that having separate tags is going to be less important for folks in a support/administration role (you folks) than it is for programmers - and thus forcing askers to pick a specific product may be splitting hairs.
Given this is clearly outside my area of expertise, I'm bringing the question to you: should there be a google-cloud-platform tag here, and what, if any, should its purpose be defined as?
Update: based on the responses here, I've tried to follow the model of the existing amazon-web-services tag, and added google-cloud-platform to the questions already tagged with the more specific tags listed above.
