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Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

news.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#191

Post by slantview »

abrookewood wrote: post #186
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)…

What's your product by the way?

According to his github it's https://www.gearlaunch.com/

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#192

Post by abrookewood »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #71

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…

AWS employees may not speak out very often, but they hardly need to. AWS is a marketing machine, from Jeff's regular blog posts, to the volume of free information they provide and to the conferences that they are running everywhere. I think Microsoft is starting to catch on with Azure promotions & conferences, but it's like Google didn't even know that the there was a race .... and they left their running gear at home.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#193

Post by lukasm »

lukasm wrote: post #90
Splines wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really - many people rely on Google Cloud and if Google made it harder for Spotify to compete (via, say, raising prices for Google Cloud for them), they'd have to be pretty specific to Spotify to not cause other customers to move to AWS or Azure. Spotify has much bigger risks in their licensing deals.

cost it not a problem and google wouldn't do it. I'm talking about stealing recommendation algorithms and models. Have a peek new features before release etc.

Seems googlers are down voting massively.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#194

Post by devsquid »

tn13 wrote: post #148
latchkey wrote: post #41

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).

AWS is often competitively priced, but Azure is usually around twice as expensive.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#195

Post by rifung »

abrookewood wrote: post #192
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #71

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…

AWS employees may not speak out very often, but they hardly need to. AWS is a marketing machine, from Jeff's regular blog posts, to the volume of free information they provide and to the conferences that they are running everywhere. I think Microsoft is starting to catch on with Azure promotions & conferences, but it's like Google didn't even know that the there was a race .... and they left their running gear at hom…

This might be true but I think the issue is that many AWS employees actually want to speak out or respond to issues personally.

I used to work at AWS and the things we could say were very controlled. It could just be my team/managers though.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#196

Post by shockzzz »

nrh wrote: post #179
shockzzz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So it sounds like BigQuery was the deciding factor in this case?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#197

Post by jakejake »

abrookewood wrote: post #182
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…

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 y…

That's pretty much exactly what my perception is. Add to that, you're account gets shut down and/or frozen without warning and only a kafka-esque system to find out why you were shut down.

It makes sense that isn't true but I have to admit it is what comes to mind.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#198

Post by frakkingcylons »

The short and sweet of my user story as a hobbyist fullstack developer and wannabe data analyst is AWS has standalone services for your apps that either don't exist on GCP or are better than what GCP offers.

I'm talking about pay-as-you-go compute functions with Lambda (I'm aware that GC Functions are on the way, Lambda has been out for more than a year already), managed Postgres with RDS, and managed task queues with SQS. But GCP's console UX is killer compared to AWS, and using BigQuery feels too good to be true compared to how difficult it is to accomplish the same thing with Hadoop/Spark.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#199

Post by eco »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #71

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…

The Google Cloud guys are always all over Hacker News threads whenever it comes up. I wish they had the same exuberance about their support tickets :(

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#200

Post by stegro32 »

nrh wrote: post #92
tn13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We are much smaller, but also use the Google paid support.

I'd echo the sentiment here: my experience of the paid support for GCP has been universally excellent across Compute Engine, App Engine, BigQuery and Cloud Storage. This is across 30ish tickets, some of them quite complex.

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