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Comment by VHRanger | Hacker News Reader

I didn't say they don't have a deprecation strategy. My problem is that they do have one, and they're very happy to use it.

12 months of notice is laughable for enterprise customers. From planning to getting something rolled out at scale, an enterprise will have eaten 2 quarters of time.

More than full deprecation, we often have API deprecation from google services, increasing our maintenance burden.

Say what you will about AWS or Microsoft products, if you build something on those platforms you know it'll be supported for a long time.

Google fundamentally values their own code above the code of people using their platform. But good platforms do the opposite - they keep the technical debt on their side of the fence to make sure you don't have to think about anything if your code runs on their stack.

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> Say what you will about AWS or Microsoft products, if you build something on those platforms you know it'll be supported for a long time.

AWS literally has the same terms.[1]

Azure claims that "certain" Azure services have up to three years of notice; otherwise, it similarly offers a one-year notice period like GCP and AWS.[2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/#:~:text=Notice%20of%20Chan...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/policies/modern#...

Again, you're not getting the point. It's about behaviour. How often have you seen AWS deprecate stuff?

The BOTO API for S3 is an ugly mess, but you can still run BOTO2 code from a long time ago. With Google I guarantee you they'd have killed off the old API in a similar situation.

Similarly, how often did you see Windows deprecate core Win32 API calls? There's no SLA that says Windows 11 should run XP era programs. It just does, because they don't want to piss off people who depend on them.

As a user, I'm happy with deprecation happy products (hi Apple!). As an enterprise customer? Nope. We're paying you to ease our problems, not the other way around.

As long as GCP doesn't take this concern seriously, they'll be relegated to being a commodity provider, along with digitalocean and friends. We'll use them when they're the cheapest, and only for stuff we can migrate in 24h.

Guess what? If I'm looking for the cheapest cloud for VMs and storage, there's much better than GCP out there.

And as long as their freaking CEO doesn't get this they won't come out of the hole they dug themselves.

I'm still using GCP services that were deprecated years ago (e.g., legacy VPC, classic non-HA VPNs, decommissioned images, etc.). In some cases I can't create new instances of these services, but those that already existed continue to work.

Similarly, we have infrastructure created with very old versions of Terraform whose GCP providers continue to work despite being years old. Indeed, I can't recall a time when Google Cloud changed a public non-beta API in a compatibility-breaking way.

I'm sure we can continue to go back-and-forth with our own personal anecdotes, but they are just that. If a more generous deprecation policy was actually something these cloud providers were willing to stand behind, they'd add that to their terms of service. Azure has some extended lifecycle services (to their credit), but otherwise, GCP's lifecycle policies are in line with the rest of the industry.

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