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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

#231

Post by raesene9 »

OzzyB wrote: post #171
skohan wrote: post #169

I've been hiring dev ops engineers lately, and the consensus seems to be in the candidates I've talked to that all of the cloud providers are somewhat painful to work with. I've worked the most with AWS so I'll use it as an example, but it seems like they sell on "new services", so they are incentivized to release quickly, which leads to services with a lot of holes and poor documentation, making it almost essential…

The only option I can see as an alternative "minimal" cloud is one that runs Kubernetes on one of the "mid-tier" hosting platforms. DigitalOcean, Linode, heck even OVH now have K8s offerings with ready-to-go (and free) control node/panel instances. Of course K8s isn't shallow but at least when you master their way of doing things you're free to go and do whatever you want. It's cheaper too.

One small note of caution there is that using managed k8s solutions has some consequences for flexibility of what you can do.

For one example, in most managed k8s setups, you can't change the admission controllers used on a cluster unless the cloud provider exposes this via an interface. Some cloud providers do more of this than others.

So with a minimal k8s managed option you might get stuck if your cloud provider doesn't support an admission controller or other API server option you need.

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

#232

Post by username90 »

CJefferson wrote: post #178
dhanna wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter argument, I don't hold much confidence in my former professor's ability to rank the real-world competence of their student's.

You may be right, I can only give my point of view. Also, even if I am right, real-world competence may involve more bluffing, less high quality knowledge of algorithms, than I would like.

Google don't want knowledge of algorithms, Google want fluency in creating algorithms. As a lecturer you likely missed a lot of gems since college testing doesn't test peoples ability to create algorithms and instead mostly test their ability to apply known algorithms. A lot of people who are great at applying known algorithms actually suck at algorithms in practice.

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

#233

Post by jeffbee »

dilyevsky wrote: post #89
bickeringyokel wrote: post #69

> One fun bit of trivia about Bigtable is that they had these internal control-plane entities (as part of the implementation) called tablet servers, which had large indexes, and at some point they became a scaling bottleneck. Anyone understand the technical jargon here? I'm a bit lost.

Check out the original bigtable paper and it’ll make more sense. I think the author maybe misremembering some technical details here though.

Maybe he's talking about the way that bigtable metadata1 is itself hosted on bigtable? The statements don't make much sense.

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

#234

Post by nojvek »

crazygringo wrote: post #202

This very long article doesn't describe even a single instance of anything GCP has deprecated. It's a long rant with a bunch of f-words, and the claim that he gets deprecation e-mails "about once a month". Can someone who is informed point to actual GCP services that have been, or are being, deprecated? From the article, I have no idea whatsoever if this is some huge actual problem with core services... or pulling su…

From what I can remember Datastore-> Firestore (and firestore is a PITA because you can only have one per project even though when interacting with apis you pass in a database name. Go figure)

Remote build execution - deprecated. Our live systems went down because of it and they didn’t even send an email they were killing it. Some person just pressed the kill switch and even support was unaware.

Their gcloud stuff asks for upgrades all the time. Older gcloud sometimes breaks. Sometimes upgrading to newer gcloud breaks existing code that interfaces with it.

It’s not that bad, but yeah GCP doesn’t give a shit a bit backwards compat as the other players do.

You get the feeling, they don’t dogfood their own shit. Like their pricing calculator is unusable on iOS. It baffles me that their support says “there is a feedback button” but there is no feedback button. They seem to only care about chrome with their cloud.google.com interface.

It really makes me think “what were they thinking?”

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

#235

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

erichocean wrote: post #208
cpcallen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes; exactly this. I'm contracted to Google, and so much of my Googler colleagues' time has been wasted in the last year porting projects off of the Python 2 APIs which are about to be shut down. Are they porting to the AppEngine Python 3 APIs? Hell no: those are totally useless (no BigTable, no user authentication, etc.). If you have to rewrite everything to replace all the functionality that used to be "batteries i…

> Are they porting to the AppEngine Python 3 APIs? Hell no: those are totally useless (no BigTable, no user authentication, etc.). That's hilarious(ly bad): BigTable was like the main selling point of OG AppEngine, and they practically forced their user authentication scheme on you too.

I think you mean Datastore, not Bigtable?

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

#236

Post by skohan »

rapsey wrote: post #222
skohan wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift can be very painful from this perspective. I just recently had to do surgery on a project because one of my dependencies changed the tools version. The back-compat promise is one of the reasons I'm investing in Rust for new projects, even if I find the actual programming much more pleasant in Swift. But I'm a bit less optimistic about Rust now given the recent layoffs at Mozilla.

Rust is not that dependent on Mozilla

I don’t think so either, but it does breed confidence when there is a large organization backing a project

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

#237

Post by tedd4u »

k__ wrote: post #189

Weren't GCP users running around telling everyone "Google only shuts down consumer products and not its cloud services!!"

We’ve been in GCP for 5 years and this really hasn’t been an issue for us. Good price, solid performance and reliability, some fancy stuff you can’t get elsewhere.

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

#238

Post by Larrikin »

nifhel32 wrote: post #197
aaanotherhnfolk wrote: post #162

It is a total hassle to keep up with Googlers changing everything constantly. It's not just GCP it's every platform they control. Try keeping a website on the right side of Chrome policies, a G Suite app up, a Chrome extension running. Thousands of engineers chasing promotions by dropping support for live code. If it was their code they wouldn't do it. The org is broken. If you want to see what mature software suppor…

Try to keep up with Android development and Play Store policies... I stopped publishing own apps on the Play Store, and unpublished all the one that I had, because of the stress and the time used just to follow the damn policies.

As an Android engineer, I'm not sure what you're talking about. There was a push to get people to move to the new permission model, but I believe that's still optional so long as you're willing to suffer with old SDKs

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

#239

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #17
mdrabla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not endemic. I think you've met a few people you didn't like, read some tweets, and extrapolated poorly. And I don't think people working on GCP are really treated that much better than their counterparts at AWS. The fact that you think the difference in product depreciation policy between them is caused by people getting "everything they could dream of" is funny though

Trips to Europe or to random conferences in first class? Trips to _any office_ for "face time"? Massages? Bonuses of any sort, including peer bonuses and holiday gifts? Refreshers? Society thinking that you're "smart" for passing the loop? You're rewarded just for being alive at Google, but I get nothing but scorn and condescension. Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make les…

Give me a break. Lots of teams in Google have restrictive travel policies and never see the pointy end of a plane. Massages cost money. Holiday gifts ceased to exist years ago.

I'm also quite surprised by your wage comment: a common aphorism is that Amazon cheaps out on everything except real estate and compensation.

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