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Comment by _xivi | Hacker News Reader

> I bet they could have 2 interns porting the thing to Google App Engine and then migrate the database

How can you possibly have this assessment without looking at the code/infra?

There are many things that affect cost beyond the visible features. The project isn't in a vacuum. It's interlocked with their other services infrastructure.

You can judge Google however you want, but they're not stupid or amateurs. These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?

They've built the service and run it for many years for billions of people. A more realistic guess would be that for whatever reason, the price is higher than what's visible on the surface and they're not willing to pay it.

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>It's interlocked with their other services infrastructure.

then they could fucking disinterlock it from the other services and leave it in read-only mode instead of killing it.

>You can judge Google however you want, but they're not stupid or amateurs.

they are not amateurs, because an amateur would have no problem maintaining a basic bitch KV store that probably fits in RAM on a single machine

Just to be clear, I'm not saying they can port everything to it, but only the basic functionality to not let the links die (then progress with it)

> These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?

You're assuming they care. And the answer of how much they care is: can this be used to further my (that is, an engineer or manager) promotion? If not then no

Google has become dysfunctional

you are assuming hidden costs, I am assuming hidden incentives. It’s not that they are stupid or incompetent, but bad incentives within the org can and do produce stupid outcomes.

If they used AWS, this would have no code and no maintenance: host the bucket out of S3 and enable redirects.

GCP doesn’t support that, but they could get pretty close using a cloud function - stick with the Python stdlib & SQLite or DBM for the mappings or use an Apache redirect map, and you’d have many years before you need to touch it again.

> These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?

I believe they don't care. What are you gonna do, boycott them?

>These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?

laziness, greed, apathy

What's happened here is that you've erroneously assumed there's a good reason. It's fun to hold nonsense like this up against testimony from the ministers and officials at the Horizon enquiry, all of whom can be relied upon to say that "with the benefit of hindsight" obviously what they did was wrong but insist that they were too stupid to realise there was a problem and thought they were powerless to do anything.

Remember on average the other humans are just as stupid and lazy as you are. Most often there aren't "good reasons" for what happened, if there are even reasons at all.

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