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AWS has established itself as being highly backwards compatible - and the cost of that seems to be the long-winded process you described. If they were more libe

AWS has established itself as being highly backwards compatible - and the cost of that seems to be the long-winded process you described. If they were more liberal with what features they implement then they would have to either be more liberal with what features they deprecate (removing a core value proposition of AWS: backwards compatibility) or they would have to suck it up and deal with the bloat which would naturally lead to higher cost and overall slower delivery of new services. For a counter example see GCP. One of the biggest barriers to entry is trust: no one wants to use it because they don't trust Google to not arbitrarily yeet features out the window with six months notice. Whether or not that's actually what GCP does, it's how people perceive Google. I'll take AWS's approach for things that I work on professionally and have to support for many years.

jedberg 5y ago
The process I described would not in any way harm backwards compatibility though. They can still run the same process, but in parallel, so that iteration can happen faster amongst people who care the most.
- mulmboy 5y ago
  Will that not lead to bloat and/or more deprecation of services in the future? I suppose you can tell people "hey this service shouldn't be relied on! We might get rid of it one day!". But that erodes trust - people just don't fully internalise what that means, they expect the same level of long term support from all AWS services. Soon the common sentiment will turn into "AWS changes its services all the time" when the truth is "AWS changes the services marked as experimental all the time".
  - jedberg 5y ago
    If you only give access to a few customers I don't think that would be a problem. Especially if you purposely make breaking changes to the API during the alpha period to make it infeasible to use in production. The key is to not give wide access. Google's problem was that anyone could turn on "labs" and use them, and then get really upset when they went away. A few customers getting really early access to a feature under NDA would not be nearly the same.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  It really depends on how it is rolled out and managed. I have lived, first hand, issues where you end up with two trains that end up being impossible to merge without breaking users or one or the other.
WatchDog 5y ago
GCP seems to be generally better designed though. Despite how conservative towards adding new features, amazon is being described here, I am often unimpressed at how poorly conceived many things are within AWS
- deleted 5y ago
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bigiain 5y ago
I totally trust Google to arbitrarily yeet features out the window with six months notice...

jedberg 5y ago

The process I described would not in any way harm backwards compatibility though. They can still run the same process, but in parallel, so that iteration can happen faster amongst people who care the most.

mulmboy 5y ago
Will that not lead to bloat and/or more deprecation of services in the future? I suppose you can tell people "hey this service shouldn't be relied on! We might get rid of it one day!". But that erodes trust - people just don't fully internalise what that means, they expect the same level of long term support from all AWS services. Soon the common sentiment will turn into "AWS changes its services all the time" when the truth is "AWS changes the services marked as experimental all the time".
- jedberg 5y ago
  If you only give access to a few customers I don't think that would be a problem. Especially if you purposely make breaking changes to the API during the alpha period to make it infeasible to use in production. The key is to not give wide access. Google's problem was that anyone could turn on "labs" and use them, and then get really upset when they went away. A few customers getting really early access to a feature under NDA would not be nearly the same.
foobiekr 5y ago
It really depends on how it is rolled out and managed. I have lived, first hand, issues where you end up with two trains that end up being impossible to merge without breaking users or one or the other.

WatchDog 5y ago

GCP seems to be generally better designed though. Despite how conservative towards adding new features, amazon is being described here, I am often unimpressed at how poorly conceived many things are within AWS

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bigiain 5y ago

I totally trust Google to arbitrarily yeet features out the window with six months notice...