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

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#211

Post by nickbauman » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:31 PM UTC

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)…

My experience with upper management is that Google isn't "serious" about their cloud offerings based on how much of Amazon's profit margin is tied up in AWS. It's an enragingly pointyhaired sentiment to deal with.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#212

Post by mratzloff » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:31 PM UTC

Today: Highly publicized move onto Google Cloud

Later: Silent, gradual move away from Google Cloud after experiencing a number of issues and bugs, constant connectivity issues with services like Cloud Storage, silent failures that do not return error messages on a random basis, detailed billing info only available through arcane APIs and not the administrative UI, broken functionality and rigid inflexibility of BigQuery, and other non-obvious negative behaviors

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#213

Post by nrh » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:32 PM UTC

shockzzz wrote: post #196

nrh wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd say the data platform overall, bigquery is certainly great . So are some other bits.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#214

Post by toomanybeersies » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:34 PM UTC

beatpanda wrote: post #117

dsacco wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can quite comfortably live on $35k a year after rent, if you're a single person supporting just yourself.

I managed to spend 3 years at university living on less than that. I've just spent the last 3 months interning for NZ$20 an hour (~$40k a year), much of that was spent paying about $260 a week for rent (paying rent for 2 places due to contracts). I managed to get along just fine.

Cost of living-wise, where I am isn't radically different from SF.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#215

Post by vgt » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:35 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #189

vgt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who's been on Google Cloud for 2.5 years now and has seen the growth and the transformation firsthand, I welcome this bet.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#216

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:35 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Express has, IME, excellent support, and I haven't seen any Google product (consumer or otherwise) shutdown "all of a sudden".

The ones people point to as examples of Google products being shut down were shut down with very long notice.

I do think that there is a very loud group of people who like to raise the "Google's just gonna shut it down tomorrow" line every time a Google service is mentioned, but it doesn't seem to be based on any real history of Google being any more prone than any other provider to shut down services (consumer or otherwise) on short notice or without a migration path. Maybe that loud group represents a real and commercially-significant feeling about Google in the market and not just a small, loud group that doesn't real effect the market for Google products. But I don't know what you can really do with that, even if it does.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#217

Post by latchkey » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:37 PM UTC

slantview wrote: post #191

abrookewood wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your product by the way?

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

Which still isn't very descriptive, sorry. We are working on a website.

Angel might be a bit more of a description. https://angel.co/gearlaunch

Anything more, feel free to contact me privately. =)

We are not stealth, but we also aren't the type of company that goes around pushing ourselves down people's throats. The people who are primarily interested in our product know about us through other channels.

That said, we are building the website out more really more from a hiring perspective. It is hard to hire people when all they get is a logo on a homepage. For now, just know that we are a startup that is actually profitable, building a great product that people want and we're growing like mad.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#218

Post by dublinben » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:38 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #111

api wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fewer than a quarter of Spotify users are paid users. The P2P model makes a lot of sense for a data-rich service like streaming music, where most of your users do not pay anything.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#219

Post by latchkey » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:39 PM UTC

boulos wrote: post #153

tn13 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yes, that is the way we started out, but at this rate, if we do it right, we will be a moderately big company by the end of the year. =)

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#220

Post by latchkey » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 11:40 PM UTC

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).

Our Google hosting costs are a rounding error compared with our revenue. That's all that matters. Build business that make money.