When I first started using GAE 10 years ago it really felt like somebody lovingly crafted a nice solution to a complex problem.

It's not that anymore.

Instead of porting to Python 3, I'm porting away from Google.

Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works and has been mostly untouched for years in eol/maintenance. you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”?

It’s far cheaper, potentially millions cheaper, to just change clouds/providers and find a way to continue on 2.7.

I've migrated 200k LoC python 2.7 codebases to python 3. It certainly wasn't painless but tools like black, flake8, 2to3 and other stuff helped. It's not impossible and can be executed in 2-4 weeks

> you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”

2.7 is not just deprecated. It's dead. There's no more updates. It's not "millions cheaper" to not migrate. I posit you'd save a LOT of money from the sheer performance improvements and bug fixes from migrating than anything else. In my own case we saved a few hundred dollars a month from not having to spawn new containers and EC2 instances

This is what happens, when no one is maintaining software.

Security is more important that anything, certainly than having time or not to update your code.

You're 100% in the wrong here, and Google is 100% in the right, and I hate Google more than spammers, more than pretty much any other company there is.

They're not wrong here, and it hurts me to support their stance.

Fix your stuff. Stop blaming others. I doesn't matter why you're in the situation you're in, you're wrong to be there. No matter what.

If you think security is an afterthought, you're doing it wrong.

this also really highlights the problem with python's 2 vs 3 split: there is a large body of work that will never be updated and will forever run 2 including actual web/publicly facing code. And saying "just upgrade because security" isn't going get much of that code upgraded.

This sort of thinking, is why places get hacked. You don't know what the access vector is. Stop making excuses. Secure your shit.

I would be so happy if a law was passed, and such actions were criminal.

Your code took a month, not everyone’s will.

so again something is just running and working why spend the money and or time when there are potentially far more important things to spend limited resources on?

op even said “yes I’m gonna but I don’t have the time” be

Like you mentioned, the docs were really shoddy when I needed them. Certain conventions felt half baked compared to AWS, and I don’t even like AWS to begin with. Overall it seemed like the integration of services was much worse than AWS, though. Administration of different services is like visiting separate worlds at times, like the teams might not be on the same page regarding design and technical language. The other possibility is I’m just a little dumb and don’t pick up on the patterns — I’m pretty open to that.

It’s a shame, I wish there was a cloud provider that I actually liked and at one point, that was GCP.

I'm curious what it is about Azure that puts you off.

I’m perfectly happy with AKS. Their Postgres product is great (formerly citus). But at the the end of the day, they still want to sell Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc. That’s a choice I will probably never make, so it just feels like a mismatch.

Granted my experience was inside Azure so we had the benefit of vertical integration.

I've spent very little time in the Microsoft ecosystem, but several years ago I was on a contract with a Microsoft shop and I found the MS server-related offerings to be pretty solid (granted, I was not the one paying for them).

The one thing that still shocks me (and maybe it's changed since I last checked, but I'm guessing not) is their pricing model around some offerings that are applied per processor core. Holy moly! Need to blow a lot of cash really fast? Then MS SQL server is for you. Fortunately (/s), it was a government contract, and at that point in the fiscal cycle they were desperate to blow cash so they didn't get less of it the next cycle.

That's always seemed like a perverse incentive to me: the people who do more with less resources get fewer resources the next round. Wouldn't it make more sense to give them more resources and incrementally expand the scope of their duties? They're clearly doing something right. Of course, it's always a balancing game. Perhaps the reason they were so efficient is because they had a limited amount of work to be done, and with more work they may not have performed with the same efficiency.

Perhaps the reasoning behind such a policy is that they're not generally looking for super heroes who might burn themselves out after doing amazing work. They're looking for people who are okay being a little bored, but who will reliably get a specific job done.

Comparable infrastructure on Azure somehow ended up costing that team around 60% of what their AWS setup cost which was a bit confusing. Their monthly spend went from $900 CAD to about $650. I never had a chance to dig deep on that, but I assume that before there was something clumsy happening with allowing expensive resources to live too long or something. It was a big difference for such a small company though.

I’m not sure if that’s a thing (Azure being cheaper) but it made me think I should do price comparisons there next time I have a budget conscious client who isn’t already partial to another platform.

Seriously, 10s of millions wasn't worth switching?

Thanks

I wager it’s just expensive to run a registry. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what they’re really selling (the TLDs), rather than the registrar.

I suspect Google finds it a lot easier to run a registry with a few enterprise clients than to deal with flesh and blood customers owning domains.

It is probably something they already had internally that they figured they could monetize easily. They develop Android and RCS. Operating their own MVNO could very well allow them to simplify some things.

> many customer support issues.

Huh? I've used them for years. Never had issues which were not directly related to T-Mobile's network. There were no issues the few times I interacted with support.

> Upon closing, Squarespace, a long- time reseller of Google Workspace, will become the exclusive domains provider for any customer purchasing a domain along with their Workspace subscription from Google directly for a minimum of three years.

> Once regulatory approvals are obtained and the transaction closes, the billing and support services for Google Workspace (including G Suite) subscriptions currently billed by Google Domains will be managed by Squarespace. After close there will be a transition period during which customer and billing information will be migrated over time, subject to limited exceptions, after which your Workspace subscription previously billed by Google Domains will be managed in a Squarespace account and billed by them.

So maaaaybe? I have no idea what these two sentences mean.

They have ~100 left.

https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/

What do you think will go next?

I'm sure some of these will bite the bullet this year.

1. Exposure Notifications (maybe in 2-3 years) 2. Google Arts and Culture <- this one has to be expensive to maintain 3. Keep 4. Scholar 5. Tilt Brush 6. Google Lens 7. Google Groups 8. Google Drawings

Google Voice seems to have been added to Enterprise, so I cross my fingers it will prevail.

Meet is for (planned) Meetings.

Chat is for text/audio/video chats/calls.

Agreed, but it's sensible to keep it as an asset should another pandemic arise - and we have quite a number of potential pathogens, from an evasive COVID mutation over a ton of bat-related viruses and currently-frozen Russian permafrost archives to bird flu.

Of course we also had another app called Luca, which tried to do a lot more direct contact tracing and turned out to be extremely insecure and leak user data, so there's that. And of course there were some plausible corruption allegations relating to its public funding.

Exposure Notifications is not an app, but a framework and a protocol, and CWA was an implementation of it, hooking in the features developed by Apple and Google for iOs and Android

[0]: https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation/blob/ma...

Killed by Google will add pretty much anything to the list. It doesn't need to be a product. It doesn't really need to be by Google. And it doesn't even need to be killed.

Also it's a sidebar, but astroturfing by company employees who stand to benefit from increased stock prices on comment boards such as this seems problematic.

It also better follows my note taking habits. It is usually a single sentence I want to be timestamped and searchable (which is also why I wrote https://github.com/wsw70/dly to simplify the quick note taking)

Keep is good for grocery lists and ephemeral data, but too easy to delete a note and no way to backup — well maybe takeout works for backup.

We have however wound down most of the protective measures. Germany has retired the official bluetooth contact tracing app earlier this year. I wouldn't be surprised if Google retires theirs this year or the next.

It's just as dangerous (well, it's probably not, due to less lethal variants winning over more lethal ones), but that measure is not what makes it no longer a pandemic.

Per the WHO[1] and the CDC[2] COVID is still a pandemic.

[1]: https://www.who.int/news/item/30-01-2023-statement-on-the-fo...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/end-of...

Google does not have their own app. Exposure Notifications is the cross-vendor low-level API which apps like Germany's is (...was) using.

Open sourced 3 years ago. https://openbrush.app

Can you imagine living in such a community?

I can't believe people rely upon gmail for anything. Integrate anything.

When I see a business using gmail for a backend, I question their entire business model, because I question their judgement.

I happen to feel the same way about companies that use JIRA... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> The open source archive of the Tilt Brush code can be found at: https://github.com/googlevr/tilt-brush. Please note that it is not an actively developed product, and no pull requests will be accepted.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/01/the-future-of-tilt...

Yet.

I'll be inconvenienced if I lose Keep- it's very handy and I use it extensively on a daily basis. But there are plenty of competitors in that market space- some excellent ones are open source.

Other way around: they're pushing Lens over reverse image search now.

It works much faster than the Google Translate app for translating text and it also helps identify any plants or landmarks that catch the eye.

I hope that technology never gets killed.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23761905/google-lens-skin...

I was thinking more in terms of why it needs to exist as a separate app.

I guess those products could work just using hosted zones etc but the DevEx is much worse.