5 ms·

This 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 who

This 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 ago
theDoug, 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).
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
I didn't mean to suggest you guys did the wrong thing -- it was just a joke. However Google is known for shutting down services whenever they feel like it and I think that you can see from some of the other comments in this thread that traditionally people expect things to be supported for much longer if they're going to build on top of it for something serious.
compumike 9y ago
If that's really the official attitude within Google, then I will stay away from using Google's APIs and will advise other companies to do the same. We should be talking about 10-year deprecation for APIs. Not 1 year. Software development is a huge capital expense. Talented developers are a limited resource. Forcing your paying customers to go spend a bunch of valuable $$$ and time in order to just move to the latest version of your API -- not even to gain any new functionality, but to keep what was working already! -- is simply unacceptable.

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 ago

theDoug, 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).

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

I didn't mean to suggest you guys did the wrong thing -- it was just a joke. However Google is known for shutting down services whenever they feel like it and I think that you can see from some of the other comments in this thread that traditionally people expect things to be supported for much longer if they're going to build on top of it for something serious.

compumike 9y ago

If that's really the official attitude within Google, then I will stay away from using Google's APIs and will advise other companies to do the same. We should be talking about 10-year deprecation for APIs. Not 1 year. Software development is a huge capital expense. Talented developers are a limited resource. Forcing your paying customers to go spend a bunch of valuable $$$ and time in order to just move to the latest version of your API -- not even to gain any new functionality, but to keep what was working already! -- is simply unacceptable.