The software industry is always on this treadmill of churn, leading to stable products continuing to have a constant maintenance burden. But that's not an intrinsic property of the area. It's a thing we do because... we can? We want to? But it's not required. Silo it off and just leave it be.
That's not exactly possible with a monorepo that has no branches and everything has to be maintained 'in step'. Any time a library breaks API, all dependents must pass tests, and/or be fixed so that they do. Any time a runtime API breaks (think things like interfaces to runtime authentication, compute scheduling, database services, network bandwidth scheduling), updated services must be made to conform and then be rolled out. As with real life, this might mean getting a 1 or 2 year old deployment system (configuration for production, roll out code, ...) undusted, understood, probably fixed in turn, etc.
As such, some SRE/SWE team _must_ be responsible for projects that are in the "don't touch"/maintenance phase. This is very unsexy, toil-y and you don't get promoted for it - and as such barely anyone wants to do it at Google.
That's Google's problem, and it's a problem they might want to look into solving if they want to turn around their reputation for killing products.
They could hire some run-of-the-mill college grads to work on a "dead" project. They could cut their teeth on low-profile stuff within Google and perhaps demonstrate abilities that move them up the ladder.
I'm not saying that Google should do this to keep everything they've ever touched alive. But spreading the talent around geographically would solve a lot of problems for Google and for California and for the world. Same for all FAANGs.
Quit earmarking $billions to solve the housing crisis in SF. Spend $1M in St. Louis and move 100 employees out of SF. Then spend $1M in Amarillo, and $1M in Sioux Falls. Shucks, maybe splurge and spend $20M here and there. $250M to build up 10 offices around the continent will do more to solve the housing crisis in CA than $1B spent in CA. And it would cut FAANG costs in half at the same time.
~100/100 SF Google engineers would change teams if they received a mandate that their team was relocating to St. Louis (or basically anywhere). Anyone who couldn't arrange to change teams would quit.
Google tried to lowball me all the way through, and asked me to share screenshots of actual emails from other companies to prove my other numbers. They increased the numbers but frankly, they weren't anywhere close to Airbnb/Lyft. They did not act like a company that would beat other offers for talent. My offer was in the AI Assistant team under Google Search, so it wasn't an orphaned arbitrary product team either. Broke my heart coz I was so keen on joining Google from the start.
Hope this helps somebody out there!
Small projects for maintenance don't need entire teams either and can be completely handled by 1 or 2 junior members.
Once the metric becomes the objective, it loses any usefulness, indeed it becomes the opposite
Why shouldn't people get promos for doing heroic acts on obscure services that actually delight users in real life? That surely has a benefit for Google. And the lack of it has a cost. Think of it like a PR budget. They'd get fewer grumpy articles about unmaintained services being dropped.
I don't think this is google specific. Keeping a dead product on life support is going to get boring for most people after a while.
But Google has always been piss poor at managing an ecosystem. Just look at the state of Android updates.
Isn't this the kind of project that should be reserved for people in explicit learning states such as (for example) novice hires, new hires, and aspiring mangers who haven't done any management before? It doesn't really have burning deadlines, it's not a frontline project but it's still something that can be referenced as work with impact, there's still the technical challenge of keeping it functional as the years go by, and eventually it will actually be old enough to be taken out back and deprecated. If any company could do something like this with their various projects as well as culture, I'm pretty sure Google could.
Of course there are probably a bunch of problems with this idea, but it seems to be more preferable in contrast to just axing a product that a not-insignificant number of people found useful and going "NEED. NEW. SHINY. TOY. MUST MAKE MONEY NOW!"
They can still kill their outright failures, of which there are many.
Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers.
Besides the code management issues others have mentioned, services like this require a great deal of product and partner coordination and testing effort to ensure that even small security patches don't break the heterogeneous ecosystem of devices.
More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.
Disclosure: Google employee but not on cloud print, though I use it on my personal printer.
Of course it's possible. Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this. And if they were it'd be a change in the protocol. It's easy to just freeze the protocol (which already happened years ago), and if any printer manufacturer wants something new then can go fork off and do their own thing. That's very different from breaking something old which is what's happening here.
> More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.
CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part. And how widespread are driverless printing standards? Do such printers actually exist in consumer households? My Dell printer from just a few years ago certainly isn't.
Of course things change. Security protocols get upgraded. New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed. New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration. That all requires human effort to make happen. All of that has to be worth the cost of maintaining the project.
> CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part.
Even if it needs them, the point is that it has them now, probably due in no small part ot the fact that CUPS is used on the Mac.
Except they don't. The clients are frozen in time forever. There's no change happening here. It doesn't matter if they should be changed, they aren't being changed. Printer firmware does not get updates.
> New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed.
IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable. But this is not an ongoing cost. There's no continuous change aspect to that at all.
> New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration.
That's not change, that's new features. As I said, simply tell those things to go do their own thing. That's unrelated to leaving Cloud Print on life support.
Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...
> IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable.
So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down?
> But this is not an ongoing cost.
You would still require SRE support for keeping this thing up running. You would also open yourself up to a lot of risk, losing user trust and potential lawsuits if it ever was hacked.
Everything you wrote sounds like an elaborate troll but I'm assuming that you've just never worked on a large system before.
Yep, to highlight some problems on the printer firmware side:
- outdated RootCA list, forcing Googles endpoint to stay on old CAs
- devices not supporting newer TLS versions like TLS1.2, TLS1.3 etc
- ossification of auth mechanism
This is true of every internet protocol. Being staffed at all does not mean the protocol or server has active security research being done on it. It usually doesn't. Taking people off of the work of constant churn from refractors and internal tail chasing doesn't actually change much.
> Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...
Sounds like you're just trolling but I'm going to assume you've just never seen a printer or worked on a stable system before.
Very widespread. Most consumers printers support AirPrint for iOS and MacOS.
You forget that there are a lot of cases where elderly people can't print shit and need actual paperwork.
I'm guessing you are referring to a scenario where you have configured an elderly person's printer to allow you to print directly to it, sort of like a one way fax machine? I can see how that could be useful for some people, but it's a very rare use case, and hard to argue for maintaining the cloud print service based on that.
There appear to be alternatives for this specific use case, like HP ePrint, or you could set up a VPN to use in these situations. You could also just use printer that hooks up directly to eFax: https://www.faxcompare.com/blog/signing-up-for-efax-with-you...
Guess who owns CUPS?
But the point being that unlike Google, Apple has supported CUPS and actively developed the software for well over a decade even though it doesn’t profit directly from it.
Sounds simple but sometimes it is not so easy.
E.g. it might be written in Python 2 for all we know. Should they leave it on Python 2 with zero security updates, or invest lots of time porting to python 3?
Obviously there will likely be a million other internal examples of the python 2 to 3 migration that we don't know about.
Leave it, of course. The only meaningful security risk at this point is something like heartbleed. We're talking security issue in 10 year battle hardened protocol. This is a fantastically rare case. Not something you need headcount on a constant basis to deal with.
If they’re not going to keep a team dedicated to keeping it alive, then you get into a situation where an emergency fix needs to be deployed or it needs to be abruptly cancelled
It’s possible this already happened once or twice which is why they had to sunset it
10 years of production usage tends to have hammered out all the "really bad bugs." Sure it's possible that something goes wrong, but it's also extremely unlikely that it does unless something in it changes. Which, if you freeze it & silo it off, doesn't really happen.
A huge amount of software not made in silicon valley operates exactly like this. It just sits there, running for decades, doing its thing.
Its a cloud service that was started pre-Google Cloud. There is no way that it can sit in perpetuity and not be worried about old versions of Java, old OS, HTTPS bugs, large deprecation plans
On the fundamentals, a service the whole point of which is to let untrusted computers from the internet connect to your home network and talk to your devices is pretty likely to need continuous security updates.
Have printer manufacturers pay for it's maintenance, then it's a reasonable argument for jut keeping it up.
If there's only a few users then it's cheap to run. If there's a lot of users then this is a mountain of bad PR right at the time they are trying to get users to adopt new products (like, say, Stadia). Since all it does is shuffle PDFs & images between endpoints I'm gonna guess this is on the order of basically free to run.
But either way canceling it isn't free, either. I'm arguing the cost of canceling this is far larger than the cost of keeping it running.
Also HP provides its own apps and integration for local printing from Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hp-print-for-chrom...
unless it's going to bring in multiples of billions of $ per year - and accelerate that growth - they're probably not interested in doing that though.
But it's more than that. Consider how something like GDPR impacts this. It requires at least some work from Legal, Product, Eng, etc. And these things happen fairly often. Even without a monorepo it takes work to stand still.
The vast majority of people using it won't see this news.
If Google doesn't make the Chromebook transition seamless and invisible, it'll be even worse.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/dzqr2d/google_clou...
Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.