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

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#111

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

api wrote: post #28

philo23 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a while ago. Not sure on the exact time, but judging from this article, I'd guess sometime in 2014 https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-ma...

I'd be curious if anyone knows the details about why: complexity, customer complaints, reliability?

Regardless of why Spotify phased it out, I think peer-to-peer is fundamentally the wrong way to deliver that kind of paid service. If I'm paying Spotify for the service, then Spotify should bear the cost of delivering it. Not me, and not other customers, in the form of increased bandwidth and power consumption.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#112

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

snissn wrote: post #102

In the same way that facebook shut down parse, I am afraid that google is going to shut down google cloud. And reluctantly have become okay with relying on AWS.

Google Cloud interacts with the core of Google's business (web services that needs scalable data infrastructure) in a way Parse never did for Facebook.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#113

Post by crb » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

seanp2k2 wrote: post #84

caleblloyd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud SQL is no replacement for Amazon RDS in my opinion. Cloud SQL instances run outside of your project's private network, so connections from Google Compute Engine have to be over a Public IP. This means accepting connections from any host (insecure) or whitelisting each Google Compute Engine VM's IP address (pain in the ass). I've resorted to running my own MySQL instance inside of Google Compute Engine an…

So, basically something like AWS's VPC? Given that it took them a few years to get that right even with tons of people asking for it, I'm not super optimistic that Google could match it any time soon. I'd love to be wrong!

We've recently released Subnetworks [1], which let you segment your network in a similar way to AWS's VPC. We've been working closely with customers to ensure that we're building out the platform in a way that works for everyone, up to very large, technically adept, customers like Spotify.

(Many of the other features of VPC, such as a worldwide network rather than a regional one, were built in from day 1.)

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/subnetworks

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#114

Post by ASinclair » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:26 PM UTC

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?).

I survive on ~$35k post-tax in SF. Though I make more than that.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#115

Post by snissn » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

ariwilson wrote: post #112

snissn wrote: post #102

In the same way that facebook shut down parse, I am afraid that google is going to shut down google cloud. And reluctantly have become okay with relying on AWS.

Google Cloud interacts with the core of Google's business (web services that needs scalable data infrastructure) in a way Parse never did for Facebook.

Google's core business is ads. Parse makes a lot of sense strategically for facebook, a big moat that they have built is around being your identity on the internet. Parse's platform encourages app developers to use facebook login as a core component of their apps. So even despite being ancillary to their business, they shut it down. Building a technology company around an ecosystem is potentially a lot riskier than people take it as. Especially one with a lot of proprietary bells and whistles..

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#116

Post by mikeklaas » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:28 PM UTC

crb wrote: post #56

misiti3780 wrote: post #39

I had no clue spotify operated their own data centers. Does anyone have a link to that compares google cloud vs aws on a per price + per service basis ?

Last year, we commissioned an independent 3rd-party vendor to prepare a whitepaper comparing GCP pricing with AWS: https://cloud.google.com/files/esg-whitepaper.pdf We also have a handy guide for AWS professionals who are looking at Google's cloud: https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws-... [Disclosure, I work for GCP, but I love all TLAs equally]

There are some half-truths in that whitepaper, like "reserved instances cannot be resized" (They can, within the same "class" of instances)

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#117

Post by beatpanda » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

dsacco wrote: post #80

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?).

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.

You can't afford rent in San Francisco at $50,000 a year, period. The going rate for a single bedroom (usually with no tenant's rights) is somewhere around $1,200 a month, well over 30% of your monthly take-home at $50,000/year.

If you're going to force people to move to the Bay Area to work for you, you need to pay them enough to afford it. Good luck hiring though.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#118

Post by devy » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #99

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…

On the contrary, GC is NOT entire blocked in China. Some of the Google services (including GC console / dashboard) are indeed blocked but GC's IP address pool and the applications running on GC does seem to be accessible in China.

My company is running mostly on Google Cloud and I had just returned from a trip in China where I've verified it.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#119

Post by jamesblonde » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

The big point of this move is the hit it will have on on-premises Hadoop offerings: Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR. It's a massive vote of no-confidence in their offerings. Spotify are effectively ditching a 2000 server, 90 PB Hadoop cluster to go GCE. As Spotify say themselves, that's big news....

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#120

Post by vgt » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 9:33 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).

In addition to all the excellent comments here. Let's not forget that the massive massive Snapchat runs almost entirely on Google AppEngine. So if AppEngine can handle their scale, it can handle most others :)