"Beta" is kind of an awful purgatory state on GCP. We all know that most of their beta stuff is actually really well-tested and stable (it's even mentioned in this article). They also know it themselves and seem to assume that people will be willing to start using their products when they are in beta. However, they have an ill-advised blanket policy that beta products are not covered by SLAs, which ends up meaning that no responsible decision-maker wants to build anything in production on top of anything tagged "beta". In many ways, you get forced to treat beta in exactly the same way as alpha even though you know that it's actually much more reliable. I strongly believe that Google and its users would be much better off if Google used beta to mean "SLA'd but with documented feature gaps and a shortened deprecation period" and kept stuff that they are not willing to SLA in alpha.
I totally agree, this is a serious problem. Because even if you understand that they mean “hey it’s Beta but it’s fine for production”, if you choose to use it and it breaks, all blame will point back to you for making an unwise choice.
There is a terrific explanation of the difference between Alpha, Beta, and Stable in the Istio project [0].
Istio was started by GCP, so while this isn’t officially Google’s definition I imagine it’s peobably the same.
It basically says, Beta is mostly usable in production, but things might change in the future that require work from you to upgrade.
