I downvoted this comment, because the general "Google shuts things down" narrative remains. Companies invested real money in integrating Google's existing services.

If Google's New API is so easy to switch to, and companies will get value from the switch, then they would do it automatically.

The truth is that the old API probably worked perfectly fine for some companies, who are now forced to spend time and money migrating.

If you were a purchasing manager in the IT department if a midwestern manufacturing (for example) company, wouldn't this kind of service shut down scare you?

AWS seems to support their services forever. That's what Midwestern manufacturing-type companies want. Hopefully Google will learn this, so AWS will have legitimate competitors.

Despite generally disagreeing with the comment I upvoted the parent because I think it provides an important counterpoint to the discussion.

I think it's too common to make lazy assumptions and not even read the article when it comes to a stereotype (true or not) such as Google's countless EOL'd services.

And personally I feel like Google's endgame isn't to provide the best consumer/enterprise cloud services a la AWS. They're just subsidizing their own endeavors in mass computing with presumably a tidy profit on the side. They can afford to alienate a customer here and there because they don't need a customer here and there. Which is an entirely rational thing to do for a corporation.

But there are other options that are available for the customer is not really much of a counter point, as there are almost always other options available.

People dislike shutdowns because they have invested time and resources in implementing something. Now they have to spend the same if not more time again. This has a cost involved.

How much work is created in our cultures because of the disposable nature of everything. Businesses use efficiency as an excuse of squeeze every last dollar out of workers. Yet on the other end the system is exactly the opposite of efficient.

I would find alternative from other companies instead migrating to their new API. Who can be sure they are not gonna have the same forceful migration in next year, next 2 years ,etc.?

Everyone deprecates APIs in favor of more evolved ones. It's pretty standard. If they didn't, innovation would falter.

If Google was shutting down the capability of doing something, like reader, that would be a different issue.

There's a rather long discussion in this very thread about how AWS doesn't.

It still might not be a great idea for Google to routinely shut down APIs in favor of other APIs if they want people to actually rely on its cloud services. It doesn't look like Google is interested in trying to make the migration particularly easy either:

> Q: What will happen with my existing models?

> A: You must recreate your existing Prediction API models using Cloud Machine Learning Engine. To learn more, please read our documentation about creating models on Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

They _are_ giving a 1 year notice.

This. In GCP, they are handling these things transparently, professionally and proactively - usually giving you a personalized heads-up, alternatives and reminders as early as possible. Facebook on the other hand has been shutting down critical APIs under my systeme literally with a days' notice.

Does Facebook have paid APIs?

Good point. Definitely not as directly as Google, but in this case I guess I could make a fair point that their reporting and campaign management APIs for accessing campaigns we as a client pay 6-7 digit amounts per month for could be counted as such.

I think we agree that Google does a better job at shutting down APIs (paid or unpaid) than Facebook does. But I don't think people are bothered about the way Google shuts down services, but rather that they shut them down at all.

Which is one thing if your product is on a yearly (or quicker) release cycle. But it's a whole different level of pain if the project is in maintenance mode and the development team has already been reassigned to other projects.

People hate migration no matter what. Maybe Google should consider what how sustainable this service is going to be before selling it

If I had built a commercial product on that API how much money would this have cost me to move to the API. Also would the new API allow me to provide a better service to my customers or would it just be a pointless upkeep task.

If you build a product on an API you don't control, you'd better always have some realistic contingency plans on hand. A years notice is probably one of the easiest cases to handle out of the many scenarios that might force you to switch APIs.

or build it on aws

yeah, and we should all be happy when we are forced to migrate to new APIs...like the old APIs got rust. This's one of the reasons why proprietary "cloud" services are so bad. Once they are gone you have little or no choice. Nobody would complain much if Google would shut down its MySQL "cloud" service. Amazon is just there and if Amazon doesn't fit the bill you can use a old good metal server. Not the same you can say about Google Cloud Datastore, Appengine or this ML API

Tensorflow is open source and apparently very popular, so I'm guessing this migration would be moving in the direction of less lock-in.

My point is that the business owner/developer should decide when to migrate to a different API or if it even makes sense for them to even migrate, not Google. The lock in was a bad idea in the first place. I may exaggerate but what's the point to have a new/better solution(Tesorflow) if the migration kills your business?

When will Google open source the Tensor Processing Unit, or something similar for FPGA accelerated TensorFlow?

To alleviate the pattern of shutting down systems maybe you should fix your design process for services. Instead of having a healthy discussion when a service will be EOL you should ask a different question . Is this service going to be able to be able to be supported in the long run ?

Maybe APIs should have standard ways of accessing the information so that transisions can be seamless. Right now your API offerings make people distrust how long you will support any API.

I have had long healthy discussions about using google APIs but it's becoming harder and harder to advocate your products (which are great) when everyone perceives that you will shut things down.

If it's so simple why not support the old API in the new systems? This just reminds us all of one of the costs of trying to depend on Google.

Why can't Google offer an open source bridge/solution for easy migration of deprecated APIs?

Perhaps the title of this post should be amended to something like:

Google Cloud Prediction API deprecated in favor of Google Cloud ML

How much of the API is the same? Would the average project require a 5%, 50%, etc rewrite?