Dear Google Cloud - Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You →
Many of you have already read this masterpiece, but this rant is one of the great ones and deserves all the readers it can get.
The gist of it is that in order for you to be a trustworthy platform player, even on a small scale, you need to take backwards compatibility seriously:
Backwards compatibility keeps systems alive and relevant for decades.
And GCP does not.
Backwards compatibility is a design goal of all successful systems that are designed for open use; that is, implemented as open source, and/or guided by open standards. I feel like I’m stating something that’s so obvious that we should all be awkwardly embarrassed, but no. It’s a political issue, so I need examples.