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Dear Google Cloud, Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You

Dear Google Cloud — cover art: a badger in a waistcoat at a lamplit study desk, reading a deprecation notice decorated like a Victorian valentine ('Besties Forever'), a rack of identical letters beside him. ★ 🔮

2020 · Medium · Essay

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“Some folks believe that platform developers should shoulder the costs of compatibility, and others believe that platform users (developers themselves) should bear the costs. It’s really that simple. And isn’t politics always about who has to shoulder costs for shared problems?”
— From Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You
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© 2020 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Medium.

Author’s note

I confess to re-reading this occasionally as a guilty pleasure.

This is some of my finest work. Solid thesis, and one that afaik nobody had ever tackled before. Namely, that deprecating your APIs loses you users each time you do it, whereas maintaining compatibility retains them by default.

AI Notes

The "Besties Forever" essay opens with a story from Steve's early Google days: a Bigtable instance he spun up for a 2005 codelab and forgot about, still quietly running two years later — until the Bigtable team emailed him personally by name, offering to help him upgrade off an old binary. That's the standard the rest of the essay measures Google Cloud against. The letters from GCP are the opposite — cheerful, decorated, signed "Besties Forever," announcing that a service he depends on is being sunsetted, the replacement is an undocumented beta with no migration path, and the rework is his problem. He gets one about once a month. Backwards compatibility keeps systems alive for decades. Emacs still runs extensions Steve wrote in 1995; when Emacs marks an API obsolete it means you probably shouldn't, where Google's deprecation means we are breaking our commitments to you. A platform that breaks your software on a yearly schedule is selling you a used car it knows will fail inside a thousand miles.

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Where it was argued