I've run a few small side projects on GAE (Google App Engine). I use it as a very simple and fast way to get an MVP off. My major issue is that their documentation tends to lag (sometimes way behind) when they change stuff, especially things that are integrated to other services they provide. For example after dropping support for OpenID 2.0, the documentation for 'Authentication Type' on Google App Engine was not updated to reflect this, neither was the documentation for securing your urls. This cost me considerable time and effort.
Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
171–180 of 397 posts
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
A puff piece would be if some tech reporter wrote about the wonders of GCP. This is the Spotify team, and they've clearly put their money where their mouth is by actually making the move.
Marketing blog spam is the new puff piece.
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#173Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too much complexity for a world that's moving to mobile clients that can't be active peers of the network.
Seems to be a pattern: wimpy mobile endpoint devices drive everything to the cloud. If so this is perhaps a dated phenomenon. Moore's Law is still a thing and today's generation of mobile devices are getting fatter and fatter.
The only reason mobile clients can't be peers is due to the metered network usage.
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Also worth noting that Google built an automated tool to handle the M/S to HRD datastore migration for you. It was remarkably painless.
I really struggled around 12 months ago. Lots of weird errors and it took down the service unexpectedly when trying to stage it.
Really made me regret going with app engine a few years ago.
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#176Earlier 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).
So what you are saying is basically that you are not doing your market research properly, instead depending on irrelevant anecdata?
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that's the case then you might actually be "doing devops". If pingdom is notifying you via sms then you may also be carrying a pager.
Touché -- That said, we don't have pinggom tied to SMS, just email. =) Pingom is just an external tool for us to graph uptime from other parts of the world. If we're down there is plenty of other alerting to notify us (mostly through Slack). That said, there isn't much we can do other than wait for Google to fix it. It is part of the trade off that we have to consider, I'm paying Google for devops instead of paying a…
> That said, there isn't much we can do other than wait for Google to fix it.
IE. "Cloud ops"
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
just playing devil's advocate here but since when do you NEED to spend less than 30% of your take home on rent to survive? There are people out there paying 50% or more of their take home on their rent/mortgage I imagine - it's just not really considered to be wise move in most cases. 1200/mo for a 1 bed doesn't even sound that bad for what's supposed to be the most expensive city to live in America. I know people in…
> since when do you NEED to spend less than 30% of your take home on rent to survive?
Yeah, that's the same question every scumbag landlord in America started asking themselves a few years ago when demand for rental units started going up.
You don't "need" to spend less than 30% of takehome on rent. If you assume you're going to be running in a treadmill your whole life, and you're satisfied working for subsistence only, then sure, go for it, blow half (or more) of your paycheck on rent. Lots of people in San Francisco and other expensive cities do this.
If you have life goals that don't involve being stapled to a desk forever, it's probably not such a good idea.
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotifier here. Frankly, price is not the biggest factor in a decision like this. If we were going for the lowest cost cloud option, it probably wouldn't be either AWS or Google - there are other providers who are hungrier for business that would be willing to do deep cuts at our scale. The way we think about this is that there are basically two classes of cloud services: commodities and differentiated services. Comm…
Hey nrh, Nice! Did you have the data tooling built out before you went to Google Cloud? If you did, I could imagine the migration was pretty hard as well. Also, all of those seem relatively possible with AWS Redshift, Kinesis, and Data Pipelines. I'm interested what Google Cloud had to offer, spec-wise.
I would categorize data tooling as a moving target - we have some, it's never enough, it probably won't ever be enough. It's a moving target (p.s. obligatory we're hiring!).
I think this Quora post does a good job of redshift vs. bigquery: https://www.quora.com/How-good-is-Googles-BigQuery-as-compar...
More generally speaking, (excuse me for being a little hand-wavey here) many of the AWS offerings feel like polished, managed versions of familiar tools. Redshift, for example, feels a bit like "hey we figured out how to abstract away a bunch of mysql instances to feel like a big processing cluster". That's not a bad thing, necessarily. The google stuff feels much more intentional - "we need to solve the problem of doing these sorts of queries at scale" vs. "we need to solve the problem of scaling mysql to solve these types of queries"
Maybe they're just better at abstraction, but whatever - that works for me!
Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Where'd you hear that?
Not without risk of giving an argument from authority, your sources are inaccurate. As late as November of last year Snapchat was on stage talking about their broad AppEngine use. (I work on Google Cloud).