This month I want to highlight an article, Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You, by Steve Yegge. In addition to Google’s propensity to cancel full products, Google is equally known for fully deprecating platform APIs. While our services must evolve to accommodate the changing business landscape, we must also maintain customer-centricity by avoiding value-less work for the customers; a pattern of disrespecting your customers’ time will lead to fewer customers over time. As an alternative, marking APIs for deprecation without turning off the endpoints encourages customers to adopt new functionality on timelines that work best for them, without forcing the issue.
“And the thing is, I get these [deprecation emails] about once a month. It happens so often and so reliably that I have been inexorably pushed away from GCP, towards cloud agnosticism. I no longer take dependencies on their proprietary service offerings, because it actually winds up being less DevOps work, on average, to support open-source systems running on bare VMs, than to try to keep up with Google’s deprecation treadmill.”
Meir's Monthly Learning Article 
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