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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

#241
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn't been my experience, and I've worked there. There might've been a couple dicks like that but definitely not the norm

I don’t know about other locations, but in Seattle the googlers and SpaceX people walk around with a lot of swagger. And you don’t have to talk to them long until workplaces get brought up and a small jab at Amazon or Microsoft is made. Which idk maybe is fair if they used to work at Amazon/Microsoft. But still I wish we weren’t so intent on maintaining a hierarchy. Maybe we just all need to develop more of a life ou…

Maybe you just don't notice the googlers who don't go around with a lot of swagger?

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the main thing here though is the older things you’re moving away from in those cases are still around. AWS didn’t remove classic load balancers and force you onto application load balancers.

Agreed. But they did deprecate EC2-Classic. "The EC2-Classic platform was introduced in the original release of Amazon EC2. If you created your AWS account after 2013-12-04, it does not support EC2-Classic." https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-clas...

Yeah but this is the customer-friendly way to deprecate - let existing users keep using the old method indefinitely, new users have to use the new way.

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

#243
post #221
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple already pulled the Python 3 stunt twice with swift. Swift 1 to Swift 2 to Swift 3 were all very much incompatible. Of course the language wasn’t as broadly used back then and Apple is known for quicker churn than Python so the need to write code compatible across Swift versions was much less pronounced

I haven’t used Swift heavily till recently, but didn’t they say from the beginning there would be lots of breaking changes in the first couple versions? Doesn’t make it less painful but they were at least up front about it.

They still don't have async-await. Once that arrives, a lot of code gets redesigned again.

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

#244
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like DigitalOcean’s approach.

Idk, DO is adding a lot of managed services lately so it doesn't feel like they're going for the simple, well implemented commodity play for the long run.

Managed services are where the money is. :)

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

#245
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…

I was surprised he called out the Percona folks by name by giving a link to a quick-start button.

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

#246

So much ranting, yet not a single example of a GCP product that Google has actually killed. Got examples? I mean, there's stuff like Python 2 support being sunset on managed services, but as Yegge himself points out that's on Guido, not GCP.

The old Firebase API. No longer possible to create new databases that can be used from the old API. Which in practice meant that "migrating to a new database under a different account" translated into "rewriting half a codebase due to a cascade of breaking changes in the surrounding tooling".

Are you talking about the Firebase RTDB? You can’t create new ones anymore? That’s news to me.

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have to realize, that software is not done when written. Software makes the fabric between everything in our lifes. It brought us tones of innovation; It is one of the biggest enabler, innovation drivers and tool we have. It is one of the complexest and cheapest tools we have. You know what happens with software which is stoped being worked on? Very old, unflexible Cobolt Software on Mainframe systems in banki…

People realize this, especially on HN. The post is referring to deprecations. You can patch security vulnerabilities and move a product forward without deprecations. Google does it well with Go.

Its the same thing.

Versioning and backwards compatibility costs a ton of money and blocks your innovation.

Legacy hell comes often enough also from dependencies you can't get rid of anymore...

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

#248
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work on Firebase. His characterization of Firestore is incorrect and lazy. It did not replace Realtime Database (which is the product he’s calling Firebase) they are two products which live side by side and both are being actively improved. People assumed that because we made a new database we were killing the older one, but that was never true.

I haven’t been totally happy with Google’s stewardship of Firebase, but that line in the article bugged me too. I didn’t think RTDB was ever deprecated.

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

#250

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.

There are plenty of counterexamples among free stuff: Hangouts, Plus, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

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