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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

#221

Post by oaktowner »

obulpathi wrote: post #79
Hermel wrote: 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).

App Engine expects your web apps to return almost immediately (in a matter of few ms). For anything that takes longer, you need to use task queues in App Engine. Or maybe try AppEngine Managed VM's?

App Engine requests time out after 60 seconds (that's 60000 ms).

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/articles/deadlineexceeded...

(I work at Google, but not on App Engine)

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#223

Post by tschellenbach »

pdknsk wrote: post #122

I notice App Engine isn't mentioned in their stack. I'm a bit worried that Google abandons it once Snapchat moves off it. It has already been in maintenance mode for some years now (save for Managed VMs). The writing was on the wall when Guido left the team. Apparently Google still uses it internally (as the recent switch to Monorail made evident), so perhaps it's safe for a few more years.

With Lambda entering the space, I don't think they will remove app engine. Sounds like they should work hard on improving it.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#224

Post by dragonwriter »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #209
kodisha wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, sounds interesting. Why do you think they will do so?

Its not their core business. Google constantly exits businesses unless they explode in profitability. As someone who currently uses AWS, it would take an act of god for me to move over to Google Cloud, even if the tools were better and even with the cost of some services (nearline storage) cheaper than AWS. I'm not just paying for a service. I'm paying because I know AWS is in it for the long haul. This is great for…

> Its not their core business.

Its the heart of their core competency. Its not their principal mechanism for monetizing that, though outside of the core advertising business its also an avenue that they seem to have made one of the most significant, longest push to make a route to monetization, even in the presence of large, dedicated competitors (behind Apps for Work.)

Obviously, any insufficiently profitable business from any vendor will eventually be closed down, either voluntarily or by business failure, but Google Cloud Platform doesn't seem like a particularly likely candidate for closure on any timescale on which any existing cloud platform would be reliable.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#225

Post by marincounty »

tn13 wrote: post #37
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)…

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…

I've had problems with their customer support. It got to the point, I just gave up, and left my videos on YouTube. (My problem was that slick move they made when they bought YouTube, and messed with the login names.)

I just try to forget they are up there. I got to one person at Google, and when they realized I didn't want to advertise, it was "Go to the help boards. I don't deal with that stuff."

Do I still use their products--yes, but don't trust them like I used to. I usually avoid customer service like the flu virus, but thought Google would be different?

I guess they are big enough to not care?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#226

Post by iamdave »

meestaahjoshee wrote: post #170
beatpanda wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

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?

That seems to be one of the common and very popular requirements to even have your lease application put aside for consideration, that being income must be 3x the ask for rent. At least this was the case in Austin proper (i.e. inside the city limits, and inside the I-35, Mopac, 183 and Hwy 71 box), I saw similar requirements when helping a friend scout for a place in SFO.

When I was looking for a place I found a landlord willing to negotiate and haggle on the deposit since my income wasn't 3x the rent ask. They took a larger deposit, I signed a lease, wasn't late once.

As with everything, YMMV.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#227

Post by nulltype »

stegro32 wrote: post #200
nrh wrote: 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.

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.

I use the lowest level of paid support, I think it is the silver plan, and have observed similarly high quality levels of support. Sometimes you get a lower level support dude and have to convince him that your issue is real, but overall the support is good.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#228

Post by toomuchtodo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #224
toomuchtodo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not their core business. Google constantly exits businesses unless they explode in profitability. As someone who currently uses AWS, it would take an act of god for me to move over to Google Cloud, even if the tools were better and even with the cost of some services (nearline storage) cheaper than AWS. I'm not just paying for a service. I'm paying because I know AWS is in it for the long haul. This is great for…

> Its not their core business. Its the heart of their core competency. Its not their principal mechanism for monetizing that, though outside of the core advertising business its also an avenue that they seem to have made one of the most significant, longest push to make a route to monetization, even in the presence of large, dedicated competitors (behind Apps for Work.) Obviously, any insufficiently profitable busine…

> Its the heart of their core competency.

For "Google Scale" computing tasks. Not someone with tens or hundreds of virtual machines.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#229

Post by nulltype »

pdknsk wrote: post #122

I notice App Engine isn't mentioned in their stack. I'm a bit worried that Google abandons it once Snapchat moves off it. It has already been in maintenance mode for some years now (save for Managed VMs). The writing was on the wall when Guido left the team. Apparently Google still uses it internally (as the recent switch to Monorail made evident), so perhaps it's safe for a few more years.

While Google could potentially abandon App Engine, it's much more likely it will simply remain unchanged for a number of years (as indeed it has roughly been for the past few years, save for Managed VMs).

GCP is now offering an increasingly larger percentage of what App Engine used to offer, so really the future may look a lot more like just build your apps on GCE + PubSub + Cloud Datastore and don't even mess with App Engine at all.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#230

Post by [deleted] »

nkw wrote: post #203
kbenson wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)?

I think it may stem from laws and rules related to practicing law, but there is certainly not any "requirement" to stipulate you are not a lawyer when speaking about legal things. However there are a few things to be mindful of: In the (all of the) United States (and many other countries) the profession of lawyer or attorney is regulated and requires a license to practice as such. In many places to practice law witho…

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