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Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

news.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#71

Post by simonebrunozzi »

I want to commend some of the Google Compute Platform employees that commented in this thread.

I was at AWS for 6 years (left 2 years ago... today!), and I've always been a proponent of being more open and communicative with developers, but it rarely happened - I guess that AWS' PR policy and such are a big showstopper for these kind of discussions. Although, some individuals did their best (e.g. Jeff Barr) to try to share as much as possible.

It seems that the Google guys know how to do it.

Keep doing it. It will help your business a lot.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#72

Post by Hermel »

latchkey wrote: post #35

What Google Cloud needs is a better sales story. AWS consistently beats out Google in this respect. This story is welcomed and there should be more success stories published like this. My business is a heavy GC user (AppEngine, Datastore, CloudStorage, BQ, ComputeEngine, ManagedVM) and I couldn't imagine achieving what we have achieved in such a short amount of time on any other platform. We (myself and another guy)…

Are you happy with the performance of AppEngine?

I have tried it last summer and was quite disappointed. CPU-bound programs that completed in a few seconds on my own computer took about ten times as long on AppEngine despite similar nominal specs (GHz and RAM).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#73

Post by eshvk »

shockzzz wrote: post #31
vgt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you prefer testaments like these from Spotify engineers? https://twitter.com/plamere/status/702168809445134336 https://twitter.com/plamere/status/702169733454495745 https://twitter.com/mpjme/status/702167231623516160

Kind of. We all know that companies cut deals with providers in exchange for blog posts, tweets, and other sorts of promotion. I'm always wary of posts like these, especially when they lack detail or awareness of competing products.

rolls eyes I have been playing with their stuff internally for a while now and no one told me that we would get a discount for a tweet. I tweet about shit I like. There is no giant conspiracy.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#74

Post by obulpathi »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #60
latchkey wrote: post #35

What Google Cloud needs is a better sales story. AWS consistently beats out Google in this respect. This story is welcomed and there should be more success stories published like this. My business is a heavy GC user (AppEngine, Datastore, CloudStorage, BQ, ComputeEngine, ManagedVM) and I couldn't imagine achieving what we have achieved in such a short amount of time on any other platform. We (myself and another guy)…

I've been relying on multiple Cloud offerings (including PaaS, IaaS etc) outside Google for many years, but for some unclear reason, I cannot manage to consider Google a reliable partner for a type of hosting or another, at this point. I would love to be proven wrong really, because I often look at their GC offering, and I /really/ want to dive in, yet I feel that I would risk having to migrate quickly in 2 weeks at…

I have been running my website on AppEngine for 6+ years now. No problems at all.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#75

Post by seanp2k2 »

boulos wrote: post #45
tn13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I avoid Google is because they have taken lot of pain to make their customer care totally suck. I mean even IRS and Comcast support does better compared to Google. I published a very critical release to my Android app few weeks back and realized that it was not getting published at all. It took me a month to get the problem resolved. I don't want to buy a cloud service where the support might be no…

We offer paid support for Cloud ( http://cloud.google.com/support ) that let you trade off responsive time (e.g., 4 hours vs 1) for price. The support personnel (and engineering!) also do best effort scanning of Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and per-product mailing lists. You can get links to those here: https://cloud.google.com/support/#community . Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, but not in Support (though I d…

Did not know about this. To me, Google has a terrible reputation when it comes to support and keeping products with large numbers of users running.

Edit: (posted too soon) my main concerns with putting anything on GC are around support, continued support / long-term commitment to the platform, ease of switching (App Engine was a very bad on boarding experience for me when I tried it a few years ago and required lots of GCE-specific ways of doing things in the code), and pricing differences that might make it cost way more in subtle ways to run a thing on GC.

I think it'd be good for Google to start fixing their story around support and commitment to products with everything else under the Google brand before people will be wanting to risk their infrastructure with that brand.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#76

Post by boulos »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #60
latchkey wrote: post #35

What Google Cloud needs is a better sales story. AWS consistently beats out Google in this respect. This story is welcomed and there should be more success stories published like this. My business is a heavy GC user (AppEngine, Datastore, CloudStorage, BQ, ComputeEngine, ManagedVM) and I couldn't imagine achieving what we have achieved in such a short amount of time on any other platform. We (myself and another guy)…

I've been relying on multiple Cloud offerings (including PaaS, IaaS etc) outside Google for many years, but for some unclear reason, I cannot manage to consider Google a reliable partner for a type of hosting or another, at this point. I would love to be proven wrong really, because I often look at their GC offering, and I /really/ want to dive in, yet I feel that I would risk having to migrate quickly in 2 weeks at…

For Google Cloud products that have made it to General Availability (GA), we have a one-year deprecation policy (https://cloud.google.com/terms/, Section 7.2). That is, if we're going to make some big change, we give you a 1 year heads up.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, but I'm not a lawyer ;).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#77

Post by kuschku »

boulos wrote: post #45
tn13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I avoid Google is because they have taken lot of pain to make their customer care totally suck. I mean even IRS and Comcast support does better compared to Google. I published a very critical release to my Android app few weeks back and realized that it was not getting published at all. It took me a month to get the problem resolved. I don't want to buy a cloud service where the support might be no…

We offer paid support for Cloud ( http://cloud.google.com/support ) that let you trade off responsive time (e.g., 4 hours vs 1) for price. The support personnel (and engineering!) also do best effort scanning of Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and per-product mailing lists. You can get links to those here: https://cloud.google.com/support/#community . Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, but not in Support (though I d…

So, you ask your paying customers to pay extra – not to get support, but to increase the chance of getting support in time?

That’s... an interesting business model.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#78

Post by jamesblonde »

an4rchy wrote: post #66

I'm curious regarding the economics of this but could anyone approximate the cost associated with this move or expenses going forward. It sounds like this would be a pretty big account for Google.

You can bet your bottom dollar Spotify are getting heavy, heavy discounts. Google are ramping up here in Stockholm, partly to get this account. This has been in the works since before last summer, so they've taken time before announcing it.

The precedent for Spotify was switching from Cloudera to Hortonworks a couple of years ago. Rumours are that they got their licenses for close to nothing from Hortonworks, they were so desparate to close them. Same rumours going around vis-a-vi GCE...

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#79

Post by obulpathi »

Hermel wrote: post #72
latchkey wrote: post #35

What Google Cloud needs is a better sales story. AWS consistently beats out Google in this respect. This story is welcomed and there should be more success stories published like this. My business is a heavy GC user (AppEngine, Datastore, CloudStorage, BQ, ComputeEngine, ManagedVM) and I couldn't imagine achieving what we have achieved in such a short amount of time on any other platform. We (myself and another guy)…

Are you happy with the performance of AppEngine? I have tried it last summer and was quite disappointed. CPU-bound programs that completed in a few seconds on my own computer took about ten times as long on AppEngine despite similar nominal specs (GHz and RAM).

App Engine expects your web apps to return almost immediately (in a matter of few ms). For anything that takes longer, you need to use task queues in App Engine. Or maybe try AppEngine Managed VM's?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#80

Post by dsacco »

S4M wrote: post #57
latchkey wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to see your lovely face in the office every day. =)

Man, you should consider remote options at least for the Customer Success given how low you're paying (is $50K really livable in San Francisco?).

This may shock you, but yes, it's livable. Many people live on $50,000 or less everyday in San Francisco. It may not be a standard of living that we as engineers are familiar with, but it is not poverty either. It's not a salary you'd want as a household income with dependents, but for an individual it is fine.
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