[OT] Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Sunday, 16 August 2020 at 22:03:07 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> Ran across this via reddit yesterday and thought people here 
> might find it interesting.
>
> https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc

Yes, the basic theme is relevant, but the article is inaccurate. 
Python 2 is on their 
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/long-term-support page.

The upgrading issues aren't really Python 2 vs Python 3. The main 
issue is that the original App Engine services (like task queue, 
memcache and the image rescaling service) are not available on 
Google Cloud in their original form. They still work for Python 2 
runtimes though.

That said, core infrastructure such as Datastore is available as 
a modified layer on top of Firestore (that actually performs 
better than native Firestore). So they do provide compatibility 
layers.

So, the serious challenges they give external developers have 
less to do with APIs than restructuring services and business 
policies. Google seem to have made the decision that they are 
restructuring to serverless, standard runtimes and many loose 
decoupled services. Whereas the original App Engine eco system 
provided custom runtimes with better out-of-the-box integration 
of services, and thus allowed for more rapid development.

As a consequence of this policy shift a worse change is coming 
next year, when they turn off spending limiting daily budgets (a 
feature many developers rely on as a safety feature). So you have 
to write your own code to shut down services when something goes 
wrong and blows your budget... (like AWS).

Sadly, AWS, Azure and GC seem to try to become more alike rather 
than standing out. Some might say it is a sign of industry 
maturity others might say it is a lack of vision. Perhaps both.