Google is killing Firebase Dynamic Links | Hacker News Reader

Google is killing Firebase Dynamic Links

firebase.google.com

As Yegge said, years ago: "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You"

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

Lately, Google has been killing products on spree. Today I read the news (1 month old) that now Firebase Dynamic Links are also being killed. Coincidently, in my current organisation we went live with some solution based on Firebase Dynamic Links recently with some partners. And now with this news, we have already started the discussion about it's migration.

A bigger discussion is that how easy is it for Google to pull the plug, then how is one expected to rely on Google for various cloud solutions they offer. Also recently Google had shut down it's domain service. Gergely had also written a blog about it https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/google-domains-to-shut-do... .

In midst of all this chaos in Google Cloud offering, my questions are:

  * Is your company concerned about these changes?
  * If yes, then what is the plan of action you guys are planning?
  * What are your view on this topic?

Yes. These actions just give me more fire as argument against every using something that is done by google. Be it GCP, Firebase or anything else, really.

Isn't that an argument against using any service by an external vendor that you can't trivially replace?

I guess using services which you can spin up yourself from free software code should be ok.

Isn’t this going in circles? SaaS is completely normal in corporate America, but Google stands out for killing things. The question can’t reasonably be “saas or not” for most companies while “really google?” Is extremely par for the course.

Migrating SaaSes is a normal activity in corporate America and often wins the ROI calculation, but building on GCP is generally questionable at this point.

Sure, Google is "special" among large vendors covering a wide market (Amazon, Microsoft) that "fails fast".

But if you stick to long running products, even with Google, you are unlikely to have that issue. Eg. so many companies are relying on Gmail and Google Docs for their work: I don't think anyone feels they are going away anytime soon. Basic Google Cloud services (eg GKE) are likely to keep humming along fine.

But there are a number of smaller SaaSes that will show up with a specific niche product (like Firebase Dynamic Links here) that may be gone as quickly as their VC capital runs out.

It's a shame because Firebase is a really good product and one of the few first-party solutions with a really complete local emulator.

The Firebase CLI is really good and the platform itself is one of the best for startups focusing on speed and low complexity to get to an MVP.

Firebase at large seems too good to kill. They could sell it instead.

Honestly it has come to the point that I will ask which cloud provider the company is using in an interview and I turned down a job offer once because of it.

For me it just isn't worth the risk of working somewhere that uses GCP. The high risk of there being financial issues when google announces something but also just the risk of that completely destroying a roadmap.

It just isn't worth it to me personally.

Remember when they said GCP is exempt from their random product killing?

At a minimum one needs a good abstraction layer to facilitate lift and shift. Docker or k8s etc

In practice it is actually super easy if you align yourself with say Cloud Run or something like that.

It’s also worth pointing out that despite the killed by Google meme, at least in the cloud side of the business they are actually super clear about what will never be on the chopping block and you can rely on so it’s not actually all that surprising or hard to work around in practice.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/new...

Yeah that's fair. Though even by that metric the majority (~58%) of the APIs are something one needs to work around?

Presumably that stacked towards the less important ones, but still not a good look

This must be a rule from now on: Never use Google Services/Tech to build your product!

It's not a new rule, really. Google's primary product are ads and data about those who consume those ads. Everything else is a fun project for them until it's not anymore.

I still remember AngularJS to Angular2, it was a big fuck you to all angular developers.

Yet another reason to never build on google. What the hell are they thinking at the product management level?

They didn't actually say when it's shutting down, correct? They also said you'd get at least 12 months notice and Links would continue to work during that time. While I agree that Google shuts down services left and right, the way it seems to be approaching this one seems less terrible than previous shutdowns.

And this is why I have a hard time seeing Firebase as more than a toy (to be fair I think Amplify is a toy as well but at least it's built on things I don't see going away: s3, dynamodb, appsync, etc).

I hate that I'm forced to use Firebase to send push notifications and google analytics.

I don't know what this does,but it's still not a good look for cloud and google

Surprise!!!!

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