Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#91

Post by vgt » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:03 PM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #63

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)…

You could have done the same on AWS (source: I have worked at AWS for 6 years, and know GCP very well)

That is true. And, as Spotify found out, what Spotify does can also happen in its own Data Centers :)

Google does give an additional level of comfort - seamless scaling, No-Ops, powerful Big Data tools, flexibility.

I'm going to shamelessly promote one of my opinions on this topic when it comes to BigQuery:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/visualizing-t...

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#92

Post by nrh » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:06 PM UTC

tn13 wrote: post #37

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)…

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…

Spotifier here. One of the big risks that we identified with the Google partnership was exactly this: Google isn't exactly known for awesome customer service.

We've been very pleasantly surprised. The cloud team has been pretty awesome to work with, including lots of engineerengineer contact, walk-throughs of systems and code for critical dependencies, and solid support and collaboration. Exceeded our expectations.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#93

Post by kyrra » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:06 PM UTC

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…

Anecdotal: AppEngine deprecated their Master/Slave datastore[0] in April 2012, and it was actually shutdown on July 6, 2015. So that's 3+ years to move to newer tech.

[0] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/04/masterslave-data...

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#94

Post by stickfigure » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:06 PM UTC

liveoneggs wrote: post #42

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)…

> infinitely auto-scalable platform where we don't have to do any devops or carry a pager You never know what you don't measure and test

Speaking for latchkey here (I'm the other guy), we routinely run several-thousand-qps batch jobs. Scalability is not an issue.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#95

Post by ska » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #69

S4M wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

Depends on your standard of living. A studio apartment there goes for around $2500/month these days with no parking or utilities. Agreed that remote would be a nice option.

Paying $2500/mo for rent alone on a $50k salary is crazy.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#96

Post by rudolf0 » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

boulos wrote: post #76

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;).

This is good, but I wish Google offered the same policy for most of their other general cloud services.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#97

Post by ariwilson » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

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).

Default AppEngine instance is only running at 600MHz. You can choose to pay for a faster instance:

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/modules/#Pyth...

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#98

Post by vonklaus » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

atrudeau wrote: post #4

This reads like they've been acquired by Google and are integrating. Now Google just has to write the check and own music streaming.

I thought this as well. They have. This is Androids answer to Apple Music.

edit: This also seemingly posted from a shelf account. Front page on HN, account 530+ days old, 0 comments, 0 posts.

Reads like an acquisition. I am not sure what to make of this as it could be a total coincidence that after a year and a half dmichel was really interested in spotify's backend migration, but either way I wouldn't be surprised if google is going to purchase or bid for it.

Maybe spotify moved unilaterally and is trying to position itself, could be a thouyght as well.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#99

Post by dheera » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

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)…

The main reason I tend to shy away from GC is that it's blocked in China. AWS isn't (which also means Heroku isn't blocked since Heroku runs on AWS, so I use AWS for IaaS and Heroku for PaaS).

If you plan to offer multi-lingual content, anticipate having viewers in that part of the world, and your content isn't something they would be interested in blocking, it's just a practicality worth factoring in.

Another reason is that I find the GC console a mess. I had to simultaneously use two versions of the console to get different tasks done; they didn't have one console that had all features of the system. Heroku was a lot cleaner and easier to navigate in this respect.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#100

Post by crb » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:12 PM UTC

dsacco wrote: post #82

crb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are vendors running managed Postgres services on Google Cloud Platform, like ElephantSQL [1] and Aiven [2]. And you can of course run your own on GCE, even to the extent of 24/7 commercial support - you can run EnterpriseDB from Cloud Launcher [3]. And, you can also run Kubernetes on AWS - we have a group focused on making sure it's an excellent experience. I work for Google Cloud Platform; ping me if you'd lik…

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Fixed, thanks!