App Engine and Google’s new Deprecation Policy

As you may have seen on the Google Developer’s Blog today, Google is changing the Deprecation Policy for all Developer products as a matter of corporate policy. We would like to clarify how this impacts App Engine and you, our customers.

Once the new deprecation policy takes effect, App Engine’s new Deprecation Period will be one year, the longest deprecation period Google offers across APIs and developer products. Practically, this means that Production Features deprecated after the new policy takes effect will continue to be supported at least until 2015 or for one year, whichever period is longer. In our four year history, we have only deprecated one Production Feature, the Master/Slave Datastore, and in that case it was in favor of a more reliable alternative.  We take considerable care that once a feature has graduated from Experimental status it will stand the test of time, and we do not anticipate frequent deprecations in the future.  

Although the official deprecation period is one year, at a minimum, if it does become necessary to deprecate a feature of App Engine we will give our customers enough advance notice to adjust their applications accordingly. Some very large customers might require more than one year; please contact us and we’d be happy to work with you to understand your specific needs.

We want to reiterate that Google strongly supports App Engine and is excited about its steady growth.  You can see the change in our upcoming new Terms of Service (which will take effect July 20, 2012) and as always if you have any questions or comments, please let us know in our Group.

- Posted by Greg D’Alesandre, Senior Product Manager, App Engine Team