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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

#201

Post by raffraffraff »

Traster wrote: post #102
mamurphy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My armchair thought: what if the CEO said "wow, Yegge is right, we've gotten really off trail here. you need to show leadership in maintaining a 3+ year old system at Google for promotions?" Could that happen and would it work?

The promotion system isn't the issue, the promotion system was the issue 10 years ago. For the last 10 years Google has been hiring and promoting and keeping people who prioritize shiny new things more than maintaining old things. If you start rewarding maintaining old things you aren't going to suddenly get what you want, you're just going to lose a tonne of people because they don't want to do what you're telling t…

Maybe... Just maybe they need to let those "shiny things" engineers leave if they don't like keeping things running and continually improving them after v1.0. If you only hire people who get bored with a project after a year or egotists who want to start from a green field on every single project, then this is the effect it will have on your products.

I think that's only part of it though. I think that the only way a company can let products wither for years without a single new feature or improvement is if they don't have a product manager to represent the users, and bring a vision to the engineering team.

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

#202

Post by crazygringo »

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 support for ancient versions of Linux... or sunsetting experimental/beta services that never had guarantees to begin with.

I'd find it pretty surprising for a platform as relatively new as GCP to already be deprecating anything meaningful, so I'd really appreciate if anyone has actual facts here.

(Also I know a lot of people who use GCP, and I've never heard anyone complaining about services being deprecated, so to hear someone complaining about it happening monthly is pretty surprising.)

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

#203

Post by em-bee »

ithkuil wrote: post #199
em-bee wrote: post #53

i think this is the key point of the article: it actually winds up being less DevOps work, on average, to support open-source systems running on bare VMs, than to try to keep up with Google’s deprecation treadmill.

Is it true though? Keeping your stuff up and running, patched with the latest security updates takes time. And opensource systems also break compatibility at times. Sometimes the installation/upgrade process changes over time and you need to learn how to do proper upgrades even if the software technically can be made to work with the rest of the system. It's hard to quantify, but I don't think it's so clear-cut as Ye…

well, being forced to adapt your system because a service provider is not allowing you to keep it running can be a significant drain on your resources. especially when you can't control when you do it.

sure FOSS needs to be upgraded too, and sometimes there is change that you need to adapt to, but you are in control of the schedule, and if you are busy you can delay the upgrade work to when you have time for it. a service being shut down won't give you that flexibility

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

#204

Post by [deleted] »

joepie91_ wrote: post #156
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #43

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".

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by mplanchard »

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…

Can’t blame you for missing it given the length of the article, but there’s this paragraph towards the end:

> 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

#206

Post by wutwutwutwut »

skohan wrote: post #172
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…

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.

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

#207

Post by Wandfarbe »

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…

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 banking systems. Guess why your bank is so antiinnovation?

Security holes

'Legacy hell'

We just need to do less Software and better Software.

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

#208

Post by erichocean »

cpcallen wrote: post #137
gostsamo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the difference between python2 and python3 in the managed services goes much beyond unicode in the Google universe. The most obvious example is that in app engine standard python 2 you can send and receive emails while you need a third party service in python 3. In my other comment I've mentioned some other issues when Google start neglecting stuff.

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.

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

#209

Post by mauricio »

Wandfarbe wrote: post #207
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…

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.

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

#210

Post by erichocean »

rcarmo wrote: post #93

I had a few laughs with this, but (maybe because I have been using Python since 1.2) I just can't relate to the Python bits. I migrated all my "working set" stuff to Python 3 piecemeal over a couple of weeks and never looked back (except when I needed to pick up some older project and take an hour or so to refactor it). The "There Will Come Soft Rains" reference, however, was brilliant. I hadn't thought of that story…

> I just can't relate to the Python bits.

I work in visual effects/animation, and 2020 is literally the first year anyone is even trying to use Python 3 (and Python 2.x) is still supported everywhere. Prior to 2020 Python 3 couldn't even be used at all (and I mean that literally: could not be used outside of isolated toy examples on alpha software that wasn't actually running in production).

We (as an industry) have written thousands and thousands and thousands of business-necessary logic/scripts/libraries in Python 2.x that have to be updated to Python 3 that work across commercial tools so literally every tool has to be updated at the same time in tandem to Python 3, so much so that the VFX Platform[0] project was created in 2014 specifically to address how badly Python 3 had fucked everyone in my industry.

It's all make-work too: literally none of us actually need Python 3's new features.

Javascript's "use strict"; is the way to do backwards compatibility if you really really really need to change the semantics and keep existing code working as-is.

[0] https://vfxplatform.com/

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