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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

#281
post #278

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…

Microsoft is definitely treating their developers well. I was exposed to this firsthand yesterday when I cloned the [ShareX]( https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX ) project to take a look at a problem I was encountering. Literally all I had to do was install Visual Studio Community, click the “Open in Visual Studio” button on Github, wait a few minutes to install the C# runtime that Visual Studio automatically prompted m…

Chiming in: just did the same with Docu, HTML documentation generator from C# XML doc https://github.com/jagregory/docu

Project code did not change much since 2010. It even has bits of IE 9 support.

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

#282
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion, they have rejected some of the greatest students I have ever taught There's no question that Google is happy to have false-negatives in interviews. > I believe they purposefully taret the type of people who think working at Google makes you a fundamentally better person than anyone else why would they do this? And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? (this is also an amusi…

> And, if they do this, how are they generally speaking so successful? They have almost complete monopoly on online search, web ads, online video, on phone OS, on browsers. And they are not afraid to abuse those to get more, and are getting away with this. You don't need to do anything right when you rent-seek most of the online world.

How is this rent seeking and not just profit seeking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

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

#283
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(warning rambling rant) I feel like this was super true in the pre Facebook days but they were humbled A LOT by the massive flop of Google plus. I honestly don't feel like I get the my s * doesn't stink vibe from them anymore. Especially because everyone knows their Achilles heel now. But for their ad revenue what would they be? Everything else material from came from an acquisition or is infra stuff. It's cool but t…

> Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra. Hadoop and Bigtable are not the same thing. Bigtable is a noSQL database. Hadoop is a big data processing framework. Hadoop is actually an open source implementat…

On the other hand, Hadoop does have HBase, which is their version of Bigtable. It was, for a number of years, a very popular columnar K/V store.

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

#284
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I understand that Azure is not exactly what one would call "mature software". I have a colleague who's been using it for a few months, and he complains about it constantly. He's had to submit a couple of pull requests for somewhat silly issues like string escaping not working properly.

I don't have the same issues as your colleague. I've been using Azure for 8 years and rarely run into any issues. Maybe his issues isn't with Azure.

I just started using it, and ARM template just silently ignores misplaced resources (wrong JSON section). Spent 2 days debugging it.

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

#285

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.

He gave a few in the article..

> > I know I haven’t gone into a lot of specific details about GCP’s deprecations. 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, and they never automate it for you, and often there is no documented migration path at all. It’s just crickets.

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

#286
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, that’s a novel take on the customer is always right

"the customer is always right" doesn't mean every individual customer is always correct and you should never disagree with any of them, it means the customer, in aggregate, is correct and you need to react to customer opinions.

But also idk what else you'd want them to say "the thing you're taking shit isn't deprecated" seems like an important response to "you mishandled this deprecation".

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of a blog post I once read, which annoyingly I now cannot find, on how the job of a library maintainer is to not break the API. If you break the API, you've failed at your job. This mindset makes more sense than treating API breakages as a routine case-by-case decision. As the article puts it, breaking changes are breaking the library's commitments. (The library/service distinction doesn't matter much he…

sounds kind of like this famous linus rant: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

Is he always like that? That's toxic af

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

#288

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…

It's more than just GCP. It seems to be a general Google mindset.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google are not competing with DO for developer mindspace, for large enterprises stability matters a lot more than new features and enterprise support matters too, for startups serving enterprises they don't do much either, what's left is consumer focused companies like SnapChat who can thrive on just innovative new tech. I can get Microsoft on a call anytime, I have account managers responsible who talk to me atleast…

>S3 API from 2006 still works An interesting note is that Amazon actually planned to EOL part of this vis-a-vis what path to address objects at, and then walked it back (for buckets created before a certain date): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-... I think the behavior is still considered "old style" if not explicitly "deprecated", but is "supported".

Yes. That decision to continue to support is costing them a ton of money every day. The older API is very expensive, This is also why backblaze originally did not add a S3 compatibility layer.[1]

This is exactly the kind of commitment I expect from Microsoft or Amazon, it is why enterprises pay premium for a product.

In a similar situation I imagine Google would have just sent a note and with a window of few months and shutdown the old API. Great for innovation and keeping your tech cutting edge, not so much for the customers who are not as agile as they and can only move slowly if at all.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...

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

#290
People are confusing new versions of things, or new APIs, or new products, or not recommenced anymore, with actually removing products. From this thread people are complaining about:

- Datastore -> Firestore in Datastore Mode: This was a seamless transition with no API change, Google changed the underlying tech.

- Firebase -> Firestore: Never happened. They are different products. The Firebase Realtime Database still exists.

- gcloud CLI updates: It is a CLI tool, it gets new versions.

- App Engine with Python 2.7: It still exists, you can still use it. There is a new App Engine v2 that supports Python 3.

- Cloud SQL v1 to v2: They had a tool to automatically upgrade, it set up replication and switched over.

AWS has new versions too. RDS Aurora v1 (MySQL 5.6) can't be upgraded in-place to RDS Aurora v2 (MySQL 5.7)[1]. AWS Lambda runtimes get deprecated[2].

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/runtime-support...

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