Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

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2021-05-28 11:30:04

God dammit, I didn’t want to blog again. I have so much stuff to do. Blogging takes time and energy and creativity that I could be putting to good use: my novels, my music, my game, and so on. But you get me riled enough, and I have to blog.

I’ll begin with a small but enlightening stor y from my early days at Google. For the record, I know I’ve said some perhaps unkind things about Google lately, because it’s frustrating when your corporate alma mater makes incompetent business decisions on the regular. But Google’s internal infrastructure is truly extraordinary, and you could argue that there is still none better today. The people who built Google were far better engineers than I will ever be, as this anecdote should serve to illustrate.

First a wee bit of background: Google has a storage technology called Bigtable. Bigtable was a remarkable technical achievement, being one of the first (if not the first) “infinitely scalable” key-value stores: the beginning of NoSQL, basically. These days Bigtable still holds up well in the rather crowded space of K/V stores, but back in the day (2005) it was breathtakingly cool.