Live data from Hacker News

Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

news.spotify.com

181–190 of 397 posts

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#181
post #99

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…

The old App Engine / API / Admin console era is over. All tasks have been migrated to https://console.cloud.google.com/ including some of the last App Engine specific administration things.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#182

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…

The problem (I suffer from it as well), is that people naturally feel that the corporate offerings from Google will mirror the experience that they have with the consumer offerings from Google. And the big issue with Google's consumer offerings is that they seem to have limited to no support and that there is a very real chance that Google will just shut them down all of a sudden. This is the exact opposite of what you want in the enterprise space, where Service & Stability are paramount. Even though I know that Google's corporate offerings are treated differently, that little niggling doubt remains. Plus, Google really needs to hire some damn marketing experts to sell the features & benefits of their offerings and make them cohesive - they just have their stuff plastered everywhere.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#183
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).

Disclaimer: I work on GCP. AWS and Azure are not price competitive with GCP, we're routinely seeing a a 40% advantage. Check out HTTP://cloud.Google.com/pricing/tco

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#184

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…

Thx boss!

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#185
post #149
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;).

Promises to do something for a year which you can change or withdraw after 30 days are really promises for 30 days: "Google may make changes to this Agreement, including pricing (and any linked documents) from time to time. Unless otherwise noted by Google, material changes to the Agreement will become effective 30 days after they are posted, except if the changes apply to new functionality in which case they will be…

> Disclaimer: IAMALBIANYL.

I like that one. :)

I have a question though, is the prevalence of taglines in any way related to legal requirements? Do you have to stipulate that you aren't a lawyer when stating things because otherwise people to construe it as legal advice, or is it just a fun little identifier of how valid we should consider information to be (like it is in other acronyms of the same type)?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#186

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)…

What's your product by the way?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#188
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that Google Cloud offering different response times for different support tiers is consistent with the industry at large. That being said, Google Cloud support is overly expensive. $150/month Vs. $49/month for AWS Vs. $29/month ($174 minimum commitment over six months) for Azure. I wish all them had a "per issue" tier. I want to pay for a single ticket/resolution. But at least Google Cloud and AWS don't have…

> That being said, Google Cloud support is overly expensive. $150/month Vs. $49/month for AWS Vs. $29/month

Your basis for ordering is their support prices which is just a tiny tiny fraction of Cloud infrastructure pricing. Google Cloud is 50% cheaper compared to AWS. Which is huge. Also, thanks to ease of use (Cloud Shell, SSH from browser ..), Google Cloud will save you lot of man hours.

Also talking about commitment, you need to commit for 1-year / 3-year usage of resources and pay partial or full bill in upfront for discounts. Google beats those prices without any commitment.

Let's compare the Cloud providers on these factors.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#189
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

I'm going to bookmark this comment and come back to it when Google decides its getting out of the "cloud" compute business.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#190
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Disclaimer: I work on GCP. AWS and Azure are not price competitive with GCP, we're routinely seeing a a 40% advantage. Check out HTTP://cloud.Google.com/pricing/tco

Seriously, go and talk to your marketing guys ... Everyone comes out better if there is a third horse in this race, but Google needs to step up your marketing etc. AWS has a massive presence in terms of conferences, documentation and mind share. Azure has a massive sales team that are offering huge discounts to buy business. Google has ... what exactly?
Post reply on HN