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Google Cloud Prediction API End of Life
- aub3bhat 9y agoI think Google just made job of some sales manager at AWS Rekognition way easier.
- velodrome 9y agoFrom the FAQ: Q: Why is Google Cloud Platform no longer supporting Cloud Prediction API? A: As we've expanded our Cloud Machine Learning services, many of the use-cases supported by Cloud Prediction API can be better served by Cloud Machine Learning Engine.
- aibottle 9y agoDoesn't matter. To general masses it just looks (and well you will have to change code) like they shut down another thing after short time people relied on. Bad move Google. Just stop offering it and keep in running in quiet for people who have it next time.
- powera 9y agoThe general masses neither know nor care about this API. "Business" folks will see they have a year to transition to an improved version of the product.
- edko 9y ago... and that they will need to allocate a budget to this migration project, and make sure it is delivered successfully. If they do not understand the benefits, "business" folks will just see it as an annoyance.
- cwyers 9y agoMan, there are some enterprises still running mission-critical stuff on Windows XP. The idea that a year to transition something is a long time window for enterprises is absurd.
- NetMonkey 9y agoBusiness folks: So instead of new features we have sold to customers we have to spend X weeks on this feature which was working perfectly fine?
- skybrian 9y agoSince nobody here has yet admitted to using this API, these business folks are rather hypothetical so far. (I expect some exist, but we haven't heard from them yet.)
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoYou may be confusing the Google Cloud Vision API with the Google Cloud Prediction API.
- aub3bhat 9y agoI know they are different, but Google needs to realize their approach to consumer products does not transfers well to cloud computing.
- debacle 9y agoGood on Google for giving people some lead time on deprecating this service.
- soccerdave 9y agoOne thing that I find so amazing about AWS (Amazon Web Services) is that I'm not aware of them ever EOLing one of their apis (I could be wrong). We still have a bunch of code that still uses SimpleDB and even though they haven't promoted SDB for a while, they haven't EOLed it.
- rdrey 9y agoCan confirm that the EC2 API team is still maintaining perfect backwards compatibility with the EC2 SOAP API released in 2006. It's kind of funny that the known issues are all still valid, too :P https://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/Amazon-EC2/353 https://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/Amazon-EC2/353
- yeukhon 9y agoMore impressively they also maintain older instance types such as m1 they rarely pull them off the shelf completely.
- decwakeboarder 9y agoec2 is ~easy though, they're just smaller VMs on newer hosts. I'm amazed that things like SimpleDB are still around and supported even though only a handful of engineers in my ~200 person org have heard of it.
- yeukhon 9y agoI believe they aren't allowed to change the hardware spec, so at some point they will not be able to get supplies anymore. As far as SimpleDB, yeah, believe it or not, on AWS bill, it still exist and most support engineers from Amazon don't really have a clue why it's there. I still don't know which service we use is using SimpleDB. Only a few cents, so nobody really care.
- decwakeboarder 9y agoIs that true? They'd still need to adhere to HVM vs. PVM, but that should be it.
- vgt 9y agoBefore folks start comparing this to Reader or point to the general "Google shuts things down" narrative, Prediction API has been superset by the array of ML APIs and Google Cloud ML, found at [0]. [0] https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ (work at G)
- resoluteteeth 9y agoIt still might not be a great idea for Google to routinely shut down APIs in favor of other APIs if they want people to actually rely on its cloud services. It doesn't look like Google is interested in trying to make the migration particularly easy either: > Q: What will happen with my existing models? > A: You must recreate your existing Prediction API models using Cloud Machine Learning Engine. To learn more, please read our documentation about creating models on Cloud Machine Learning Engine.
- ben_jones 9y agoIf I had built a commercial product on that API how much money would this have cost me to move to the API. Also would the new API allow me to provide a better service to my customers or would it just be a pointless upkeep task.
- jo909 9y agoIf you build a product on an API you don't control, you'd better always have some realistic contingency plans on hand. A years notice is probably one of the easiest cases to handle out of the many scenarios that might force you to switch APIs.
- joncampbelldev 9y agoor build it on aws
- hackunomatter 9y agoThey _are_ giving a 1 year notice.
- conradk 9y agotl;dr Cloud Prediction is deprecated in favor of Cloud Machine Learning (https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/ https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/)
- iagovar 9y agoI'm tired of Google shutting down or screwing up services. I come from marketing, and while I still use Adwords, I'm more and more moving to other platforms for research and spending my money. It's not only that, the moment you have a problem, it's up to yourself, while other companies have a customer service that actually replies, with more or less success. I'm also learning programming, basically because I want to get into Data Science and I'm doing everything I can to avoid using Google Cloud, even though I found Bigtable to be easy to use and the kind of stuff that I wanted for a project, but I forced myself into learning how to get a postgre & couch dbs up. Also using vps's from a local provider (clouding.io). It's like... I can see myself in the future spending time on modifying stuff because Google make X decision, instead of doing stuff I enjoy.
- numbsafari 9y agoJust curious, were you using the Predict API?
- jonbarker 9y agoTotally misread this as google cloud predict-the-end-of-your-life API.
- ben_jones 9y agoThe engineering team working on that all abruptly left their jobs once it hit alpha. They are now traveling abroad and spending more time with their loved ones.
- microtherion 9y agoI misread this as a service to predict the EOL date for a given Google API.
- yahelc 9y agoSomeone actually built a model back in 2013 to predict risks of various Google APIs shutting down: https://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns https://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
- ktamura 9y agoNow this is going to be a moneymaker, this is a sensible business move. People misunderstand Google: they offer things for free because it lets them collect data (search, gmail, etc.) or it drives competition out (1TB free for BigQuery, for example). For everything else, they either shut them down or charge money =)
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoThe Predictions API costs money. The replacement also costs money. What are you trying to say?
- random123456 9y ago> Q: What will happen with my existing models? > A: You must recreate your existing Prediction API models using Cloud Machine Learning Engine. To learn more, please read our documentation about creating models on Cloud Machine Learning Engine. Slightly edited and corrected answer should be > A: You must recreate your existing Prediction API models using Cloud Machine Learning Engine. But, you know what? You must recreate it using Amazon Machine Learning, because we might again shut down this service in favor of our next platform. So If you care about your product, move directly to Amazon Machine Learning so next time you will not be bothered by us. And thanks for using it
- thesandlord 9y agoPrediction API was closed source and proprietary. Cloud Machine Learning Engine is open source Tensorflow. You can run these models on prem, on AWS, etc.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- omarforgotpwd 9y ago"Let's build our entire stack around Google Cloud. I'm sure they won't shut down an API we depend on"
- theDoug 9y agoThis one-year-long deprecation warning comes atop what is a fairly reasonable migration path for most users. I have yet to hear of a single user of any size whose “entire stack” relied on a single API, let alone this one, and who would be left without a faster, easier, or less expensive option in this move. But you might have info I do not! (Work at Google Cloud)
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago> This one-year-long deprecation warning comes atop what is a fairly reasonable migration path for most users After working at multiple, large companies as well as doing government contracting, it would take a year just to propose and get funding for very minor changes. Sometimes it would take months to get critical bugs or security issues approved and taken care of. A year works for many tech companies. Maybe even most. But it's laughably tone deaf when talking about larger companies or government organizations. This is why the majority of companies I've worked with opt for APIs from, say, AWS and only consider using a Google API if there is literally no other choice. No one wants to be focused on X and suddenly have to allocate money to change something that's working to use something else.
- grogenaut 9y agotheDoug, how long do you typically get internally to move off of major services to new revisions at Google? Are there services that have been deprecated for more than a year, or even been resurrected? If so then 1 year really isn't reasonable to someone who built on a service. At big co I worked at, I would routinely see 3-5 year deprecation plans with a possibility of paid support after. A bank I was consulting for was using Java 1.3 in 2010 and paying oracle millions to keep it patched as they wanted to have a standard java across the company and a key system was very afraid of upgrading (I think they were really stupid but it's their money).
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- faragon 9y agoDoes Google use ML to predict the failure of one service?
- boulos 9y agoThis shutdown had an incredibly healthy discussion internally. The reality is that this service had been unmaintained for a long while, but we'd previously chosen not to start this deprecation process until we had a GA service we could actually have someone migrate to (Cloud ML Engine). Additionally, it turns out that very few people were using it. That's not an excuse, but the reality of ongoing investment. I fought hard for this to be our expected 1 year term, and we had hoped to have a somewhat cookie cutter guide for "Here's how you reproduce this with TensorFlow". Quite frankly, the handful of users of the prediction API likely aren't the kind to happily port to TensorFlow (and this service has existed since the sort of App Engine only days, so they're mostly hobbyists, but I still care). It's never great to "have to" turn down a service, but ultimately when forced between letting the code rot and become a potential security nightmare versus give the small set of users some time to retool, the decision was made to go with the latter. No new features is an easy way to keep something running forever, but keeping the damn thing secure requires a team to stay on top of it. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- tuna-piano 9y agoHow much does Google Cloud spend on marketing and sales of its services, how much business do they lose from companies who believe that Google could shut down their services in a few years? How much would they have spent on maintaining this service? I can tell you, from my experience at mid-market size non-tech clients looking to move to the cloud, that Google's reputation for shutting down services is known and is a negative. AWS' reputation for leaving services alive is also known, and is a positive. When companies buy software, they don't want to have to worry about the future- they just want it to work. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was a big driving force for IBM's success. "No one ever got fired for choosing AWS" seems to be true these days. If you want that phrase to be "No one ever got fired for choosing Google Cloud"- you probably shouldn't deprecate services like that. I wonder if anyone got fired for choosing Google Cloud, after Google shuts down one of their services?
- FmrAMZN_TA 9y agoEver? What if they had a 10 year deprecation policy?
- subcosmos 9y agoIt didn't meet our needs in classifying hotdogs vs everything else.
- ris 9y agoDidn't see that coming, eh?
- xena 9y agoWhy not just make the old API be a wrapper for the new one?
- koolba 9y agoI initially read this title as an API to predict when Google Cloud APIs would be end of lifed.
- davidmr 9y agoThe discussion seems to have pretty well settled on Google's policies around service deprecation, but in case anyone's interested in chatting about the replacement API, I'm excited about the long-term prospects of their ML Engine product. The open-source distributed tensorflow stuff is pretty nice, but it still requires a huge amount of hand coding and tuning the machinery, reminding me quite a lot of just rolling the damn thing in MPI yourself. I'm very excited to see where distributed tf will be in a year or two, but it's a chore today. The hope is that using Google's secret sauce to auto-distribute the execution graphs and associated data ingestion makes things "just work". At the moment, the documentation and examples for that are a bit all over the place at the moment, and require writing models to conform to the newish tf.contrib.learn.Experiment API, which is also a bit underdocumented and underexampled. Using it for very large datasets (say >tens of TB) seems to be pretty challenging at this moment (to me at least). At any rate, I've been banging around on it for a few weeks and am really hopeful. I will follow Cloud ML Engine's career with considerable interest.
- faragon 9y agoTL;DR: if your business relies on a Google API/service, your business is in risk.
- mdekkers 9y agoThere is no way I will ever build a product, or spec anything for a client, that depends in some way on a Google offering other than public search.