Hacker News Reader

Comment by FmrAMZN_TA | Hacker News Reader

I think this is disingenuous. AWS keeps something running forever, that's true, but in what state?

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121711

(We were well aware of this thread, and others like it, internally)

Something that exists, but has absolutely no investment and unknown support is probably not a great thing. Given that EC2's recent outage was because they hadn't restarted their services in a long time[1], what problems exist here? I think that Google probably should have a SUPER long deprecation policy (24 months feels right), but a year isn't terrible - and I'd rather explicitly get a statement like this than the zombie services elsewhere.

Disclosure: I used to work at AMZN and am highly biased.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

View on HN

As a big and long time user of AWS I thought it was pretty obvious that SimpleDB was deprecated when DynamoDB came out, and am surprised you think it is somehow bad to maintain a service in a "zombie" state is somehow worse than killing it... the way AWS plays this allows customers using the service to decide to move to a new service because it is better or cheaper, and on their own time scale (!), rather than being forced to drop everything else they are doing to go back to some old project and plan a migration.

I am so sick of companies thinking "a year (or even two!) to migrate is long enough for anyone": do you realize how many services I use? Do you realize how many random products I have built? If every service deprecates their API once every five years and gives everyone two years to update, and you use 20 services (this is common!), that means that every few months you are having to go back through all of your projects you have ever built to rewrite them against some new API. That is absolutely insane.

So, then your answer is never deprecate?

See my new comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14344415 (I'm on a plane, so late to the party). I'm disappointed in this particular service deprecation, but your broader point applies regardless of the specific service: once you start using several, there's the potential for burning a lot of your engineering budget just rewriting and retooling.

On a meta level, I've seen an incredibly high number of risk averse companies just using EC2/S3 or GCE/GCS. That's not to say I disagree with using tons of services (that's how you get value!), but it's clearly food for thought.

I'd love to see historical data on the various cloud service turndowns, though I suspect there's too little track record to draw meaningful conclusions (and for some folks, abandonware is just as bad as turndown).

[Edit for disclosure since I wasn't in this thread before]

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com