Why is AWS breaking Node developers?

[scripting]

From this blog post...

I have been getting warnings on all my Node.js code that uses AWS api's that come September they're all going to break. I'm working on my mail list stuff this week, trying to get the HTML to work for a lot more people than it was working for, and it's a very depressing process, but I did the work, but I don't plan on looking at this again for another five years. But lurking in the background is the threat by AWS, and I consider a threat, that if I don't rewrite my code in a non-insignificant way, before September, it's all going to just stop working. I took the time the other day to actually look at what's involved, and I see that they changed their API to use promises. Great. Another stupid exercise in fealty. I think they're going to regret doing this, because I don't have the time to go so deep in the bowels of pretty much my entire codebase, and potentially break everything, and then have to debug it, when I have so many other things to do, and I'm getting older, and I just don't have the energy to devote to make-work for Amazon. The arrogance of it, and how diseconomic it is. They never promised they wouldn't break all their developers, but geez who would've thought they wanted to? I don't think they're actually going to be able to flip the switch. I'd love to hear what other developers think.

[danmactough]

Man I wrote a screed almost identical to this (esp your PPS). It's infuriating to watch this debacle. And it's even more infuriating to know it's happening because of AWS company culture. Engineers are rewarded for doing big bold things, so someone saw the bad API of v2 of the SDK and decided to get themselves a promotion and a pay bump by "fixing" everything with a v3 of the SDK.

Honestly, I agree the API is better in v3, but the utter disregard for our time by forcing us to rewrite this entire layer of our apps (especially when the supposed gains in smaller deployments are laughably wrong) demonstrates that no one is guarding the store there any more. The lunatics are running the asylum.

[scripting]

@danmactough -- glad i'm not the only one who feels this way. :-)

i learned this lesson the hard way with Frontier, breaking developers is not an option. Even when you say up front, this is an experimental API and will be pulled back when the real version ships, you end up supporting the provisional API indefinitely.

I also got to know the CEO of the company that makes Font-Awesome, a great product -- but when they went from version 5 to 6, they changed the names of all the icons, so you couldn't just upgrade to the new version, you had to change all your code. Someone said it was okay to break developers in a full-point change, well actually it's not.

My favorite thing to hate is when some random Node package that another random Node package requires decides to use some stupid JavaScript feature that's only supported in Node v200,000 and I can't upgrade because some other package some other random package uses won't run in that version. What a mess.

Microsoft was pretty good at not breaking users, but Automattic/Wordpress is damn near perfect. They still support the Metaweblog API that came out in 2002.

Apple is pretty bad. Google is trying to break the freaking web by deprecating HTTP of all things.

Tech needs some rules about this.

[scripting]

I guess now we'll find out how much software running on top of the AWS API is written in Node.js. ;-)

[scripting]

Another example of unnecessary breakage -- the Bootstrap Toolkit.

[scripting]

The docs pointed to by the deprecation notice.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/announcing-end-of-support-for-aws-sdk-for-javascript-v2/