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Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

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Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#151
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Google's core business is providing web services and putting ads on them. That core business means Google focuses a lot on running those web services effectively, which is why they are now focusing hard on the business angle of running other people's web services. Google spends $2+B per quarter on capital expenditures; where do you think that money is going if not datacenters? Using Facebook as a default login was ne…

And at some point your company might decide that it's already its biggest customer for its cloud products and close it to the public.. or it might not.. but it's up for me to decide where I host :)

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#152
This was mentioned somewhere deep in a thread, but Spotify (and others!) will be speaking at our upcoming customer conference (GCP Next) in a few weeks:

https://cloudplatformonline.com/NEXT2016-schedule.html

You'll be able to livestream the sessions here:

https://cloudplatformonline.com/NEXT2016-Live.html

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and I'll be at Next).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#153
post #145
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engineer engineer contact, walk-throughs of systems and code for critical dependencies, and solid support and collaboration. Exceeded our expectations.

I am not surprised. Spotify is a big company. The question is will it work exactly same for Joe's Inc.

I think latchkey at the top of this thread is precisely "Joe's Inc".

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#154
post #95

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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.

Is $1,500 much better?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#155
post #88
post #77

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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.

Paying more for more support cases or more urgent responses is standard practice for support plans. For example, here's the AWS Support comparison page: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/compare-plans/ which has similar tiers of support.

Let me get this straight, OVH – which is known for bad support – provides the same service for free that AWS provides at 49$/month?

That’s surprising.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Do you have any source that Spotify has been acquired by Google? It sounds like baseless rumormongering to me. This wouldn't be a good way to announce such an acquisition anyway.

Sorry it was a flippant guess, which frankly I still stand behind as likely to be correct, but if unclear it was a guess.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#157
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a paid support service that is actually pretty good. It sounds like you're avoiding the generic Google in the same way you'd not buy something from Amazon vs. using AWS.

As I said Google's reputation is what made me not even bother to try. We all know that AWS and AZURE both are state of art and very competitively priced. If Google wants to beat them they have to win the perception war too. (OR reduce prices substantially).

I don't agree that AWS and Azure are actually competitively priced with Compute Engine anymore. Following our price cut last May and our custom VM shapes, we're often 40% cheaper:

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Ye...

that's a massive lead (and it's sadly not commonly known). So I agree with you, we need to do better in the perception war, but Compute Engine is hands down the leader in cloud pricing.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and care a lot about our prices).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#158
I would be interested to get some more technical info. OK so you use GC, but how? What products do you use, how do you build your scalable infrastructure so anywhere in the world I can have all the music in the world? I love reading those type of posts from Netflix and was hoping to find something similar here

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#159
post #120
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

No longer true. It's all GCE now last I heard.
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