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Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

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Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#111

Post by remus »

larrymcp wrote: post #54
remus wrote: post #35

I'd be interested in some concrete examples of things GCP have depreciated. I'm an (admittedly fairly light) user of GCP and haven't come across any myself.

I saw that he mentioned a few of them in the article. He writes: I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with a totally different API) to App Engine (don’t even get me started) to Cloud Endpoints to... I dunno, _everything_, has forced me to rewrite it all after at most 2–3 years.

Thanks for taking the time to list them out, didn't spot those in the article.

Personally, I think most of them seem quite sensible. Having a 'support everything forever' approach is obviously going to impose a huge burden on the teams who maintain this stuff which is then going to limit the ability to make anything better. The depreciation notices generally seem pretty good (12-15 months notice by the looks of it, sometimes followed by degraded functionality rather than complete removal of the feature).

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#112

Post by te_chris »

blickentwapft wrote: post #104

A perfect, spot on analysis. The only thing that’s weird about this is that it’s about 3 years late. If this had been written 3 years ago it would have been topical. But really it’s old news that google deprecates everything and leaves it’s developers in the lurch and that as a result no one wants to use their stuff. It’s not surprising to hear this from Steve Yegge cause he’s a super switched on guy, but it’s surpri…

I mean maybe I’m not their dream customer or whatever, but we’re happy with google cloud for our purposes - GKE, CloudSQL, Redis.

I really enjoyed the essay and surely is some truth, but these products have all been pretty good for us.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#113

Post by remus »

packetslave wrote: post #100
walki wrote: post #78

I have personally used a large number of cloud compute services: AWS, packet, Alibaba, Digital Ocean, nimbix, Azure, Oracle, ... I still use all of these services from time to time. If you carefully look at my list of cloud vendors you realize that there is only one of the big cloud vendors missing: GCP. Why? When GCP came out I wanted to switch from AWS to GCP because AWS was costing me a lot of money and GCP was ma…

Let me guess, you're based somewhere in Europe? I don't remember the specifics, but the "business only in Europe" thing was 100% the fault of the EU's (tax?) laws. Not sure if that ever got resolved, actually.

I guess it must have done as Im based in the EU and was signed up for a personal GCP account at one point.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#114

Post by blickentwapft »

te_chris wrote: post #112
blickentwapft wrote: post #104

A perfect, spot on analysis. The only thing that’s weird about this is that it’s about 3 years late. If this had been written 3 years ago it would have been topical. But really it’s old news that google deprecates everything and leaves it’s developers in the lurch and that as a result no one wants to use their stuff. It’s not surprising to hear this from Steve Yegge cause he’s a super switched on guy, but it’s surpri…

I mean maybe I’m not their dream customer or whatever, but we’re happy with google cloud for our purposes - GKE, CloudSQL, Redis. I really enjoyed the essay and surely is some truth, but these products have all been pretty good for us.

No doubt what is there works and works well.

The issue is that developer confidence is very low due to google being in a never ending relentless drive to cancel stuff.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#115

Post by speedgoose »

merb wrote: post #101
walki wrote: post #78

I have personally used a large number of cloud compute services: AWS, packet, Alibaba, Digital Ocean, nimbix, Azure, Oracle, ... I still use all of these services from time to time. If you carefully look at my list of cloud vendors you realize that there is only one of the big cloud vendors missing: GCP. Why? When GCP came out I wanted to switch from AWS to GCP because AWS was costing me a lot of money and GCP was ma…

that was sily because they only asked for a company name but you could've entered "Individual" inside the box and they would not care!

That's a bit risky. Google is well known to close accounts and have no humans you can contact.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#116

Post by Jabbles »

sitkack wrote: post #66

> Let’s say hypothetically that Apple was dumb enough to pull a Guido van Rossum, and declare that Swift 6.0 is backwards-incompatible with Swift 5.0, much in the way that Python 3 is incompatible with Python 2. Damn, I was waiting for this. The whole essay was a setup for this paragraph. Reframes the argument using a shared traumatic experience for everyone. This humanizes the effect, we all know someone that lost s…

Apple already ~mandated moving apps to Swift. I don't see why they couldn't do it again? Purely because of the existence of Flutter?

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#117

Post by Jabbles »

causality0 wrote: post #10

Google is an absolutely fantastic company from which to get free stuff. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Youtube? Mmm-mm good! Buy things from Google, though? You mean, give Google money and in exchange expect them to adhere to some kind of standard of behavior, support, and customer service? Go get a coffee because you're clearly not awake yet.

This is the exact opposite of the usual complaint: that if you don't pay for support you can expect Google to arbitrarily shut your account and scoop up all your data - however paying them actually allows you some control.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#119

Post by BossingAround »

sitkack wrote: post #66

> Let’s say hypothetically that Apple was dumb enough to pull a Guido van Rossum, and declare that Swift 6.0 is backwards-incompatible with Swift 5.0, much in the way that Python 3 is incompatible with Python 2. Damn, I was waiting for this. The whole essay was a setup for this paragraph. Reframes the argument using a shared traumatic experience for everyone. This humanizes the effect, we all know someone that lost s…

> we all know someone that lost someone to the Python2/3 transition

This feels like a very strange perspective. Why is it a problem to "lose" someone from a language? You're an engineer (a presumption on my side); casting yourself into a subsection of a "Python engineer" seems like a move with all the downsides and no upsides.

Re: Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

#120

Post by BossingAround »

jimmaswell wrote: post #60
userbinator wrote: post #27

It's odd to see an article emphasising backwards compatibility, but not a single mention of Microsoft (I even ctrl+F'd the page source to check!) They've regressed a bit in the recent years but I'd still consider MS the gold standard for back-compat. I have Win32 binaries I last modified over 15 years ago, small (or perhaps tiny - size measured in KBs) utilities that I use daily. They worked perfectly on Win95, and s…

The absolute worst in my small experience with it is anything touching the node ecosystem. Try to follow any guide or use any library not updated in the last week and there will be breaking API changes and deprecation warnings everywhere.

I'm running into this problem more and more. It seems like Node is fundamentally unusable for anything but the nimblest teams that do not mind updating their dependencies automatically, every week, and when something breaks, they are capable of fixing it within hours.

I really like Node as a language (especially with TS), but Node as an ecosystem feels like a very hard fit into 90%+ of corporations.

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