The standard "lol google will kill it in 6 months anyway" troll doesn't really apply to Google Cloud services. They know better than to be fickle with infrastructure offerings.
Are you sure? Have you used appengine or any of their cloud libraries? Just found out that some of the services I wrote 3 years ago don't work anymore due various breaking changes. It also very much applies to cloud services themselves! What happened to the email service(appengine powered)?I'm telling you: it no longer exists! Compare that with AWS SES which gets better and better. I could go on and on all day long. Google cloud is nice on paper but fails in practice. If you consider the lock-in it is not worth it on paper either
That happened to me and my sites were down for four months. I lost 15 years of seo, and $30/mo revenue... They just shut down the Python app engine sites with no notice. I'll never use google cloud.
I wish it were. It was an enormous amount of effort to get my pagerank that high. I suppose I could post my google analytics before and after, but that's not really data I share with the public.
I'm not doubting your site was "down for four months". I'm doubting the part where you said "They just shut down the Python app engine sites with no notice".
Most notably, I know many people who run these types of sites and outside of GAE being mediocre, I've never heard them complain about anything like that.
This was the very first version of app engine that rolled out in 2008 or so. It showed some type of "incompatible version" notice in the admin ui when I noticed it, and when I tried to redeploy the sites using the command line deploy tool. I switched everything to s3.
How much advance notice did they give when they were shutting down that email service? I bet it was like eight months or more. Things change, you have to deal with it sometimes. Seems kinda normal.
People don't like to rewrite infrastructure code just b/c the provider decided it's not worth it anymore. When you sign up you consider the whole ecosystem not individual services. The cloud platform is marketed as reliable and rock solid that you can trust. It may be the case with AWS but on Google you should expect experimental, cheap and a high risk to get broken or even deprecated all together. It behaves like a start-up with customers paying for experiments. It's OK for some use cases but you should be aware of that.
No trolling, just tired of setting up things that just stop working and forcing me to work on a fix. I dont work for a big company with a dev team of 20 people, its just me and customer support. Im close to a burn out as it is, I dont need help with it.
I've used Appengine since 2009. Early on they deprecated the original master-slave datastore, but apart from that I've had zero refactoring around their services.
Other services are a different story - from my perspective Google are better at supporting legacy interfaces than most.
I hear you, discontinuing products that you're dependent on is painful, but discontinuing services that you built your infrastructure around is an outright killer.
Counterpoint from an email I received just last week (Feb 21st):
> We are writing to inform you that we are winding down sales and renewals of Google Site Search (GSS). Starting April 1st, 2017, new purchases and renewals of GSS will not be available.
GSS isn't under Cloud and doesn't have the same deprecation policy. Cloud explicitly states that it has a minimum 1-year turndown on any feature they disable.
> Cloud is still competing with on premises solutions, right? One year is nothing, try ten or twenty.
Not an expert by any means but I would put more weight to Google's ONE year promise over (to give an example) HPE's twenty years promise. I know it is a cheap shot because I am pretty sure HPE will be bought and sold at least once in the next twenty years.
FWIW I am now dealing with a system that is supported by HPE for over 10 years now. Even if they get bought out, someone will inherit those support obligations. I am also in the camp of not trusting Google with anything.
GSS shutdown gives us a year also. I just migrated to GSS a year ago. And they decommissioned they big appliance Google Enterprise Serarch I think it was called.
We were users of the Google Mini Search appliance, went to a 3rd party in-house installed search solution that we did not like and then a year ago went to GSS. We are looking again for something suitable. The best part of the Google Site Search was search fidelity.
Not entirely true. App engine depreciations happen all the time and they give about 1 years notice. Most recently the channel api, before that prospective search, backends, etc etc
Well, if it's something you've built your entire offering around it could be a simple fix, or it could be months of work, and that will vary by project. Bear in mind that this is completely non-value-adding work that you didn't plan on just to bring your project back to a functioning state.
I.e., some douchebag who has no interest or stake in what you do has just dumped a potentially substantial amount of technical debt into your product backlog and, quite possibly, prioritised it all the way to the top.
As somebody else noted above: I don't need people creating more work from me. I can do that quite well enough on my own, thanks very much, and for side-projects this kind of chopping and changing is a pain in the ass.
By definition, with side-projects time is limited, so you absolutely have to focus on the most valuable activities to the exclusion of all else. For this reason, I only consider AWS and Azure for my projects: Google are just too fickle. Lucky you, if you have the time to deal with their nonsense.
(Btw, I'm not dissing Google on a technical level - they obviously do great, interesting work, and they're certainly one of the pioneers of PaaS. I just don't need the hassle of having to fix stuff because they keep killing APIs, projects, services.)
Yes exactly. The app specifically affected by Channels API depreciation is a side project that serves a few thousand people. It marches along perfectly well, and I pay Google money for it each month - though the project itself makes no money. Now, I need to consider whether the shift from Channel API to Firebase (and the few days work it'll take to do) is worth the investment, or if I should just shut it down.
