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Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

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Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#232
post #203

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…

That lines up with what I assumed, and the last paragraph is specifically what I was asking about (not the IANAL case so much as the opposite). Thanks!

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#233
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.

My rent in Los Angeles for my studio apartment is about 43% of my monthly take-home, and that's sub-$1000. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's definitely liveable. I don't often have to /worry/ about money... I just am also not saving anything.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#234
post #171

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 up…

Hi NearAP,

I'm a Product Manager on App Engine and I truly apologize for the trouble you went through when you tried the platform. We have kicked off a large initiative to update and enhance our docs, and we just recently launched our new App Engine docs, an ongoing project of course. You can check them out here:

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs

Please give the new set of docs a try and please give us feedback when you see errors or generally when the content is not up to par with what you expect. There is a tool on the top right hand side of every page that explains this.

Thank you! Amir

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#235
We (Sojern) moved to 100% GCP as well this month, admittedly not nearly at the same scale as Spotify, but we did. Other than some growing pains - that GCP team is already aware of - this has been a very smooth migration for us.

We use Google Cloud {Storage, BigTable, Container Engine, BigQuery, Monitoring, DNS, Compute} and may be some services I'm missing. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#236

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…

For me personally[0], the difference isn't being able to speak in terms of marketing, but in terms of engaging with users who have problems. It may not translate to much in terms of run rate, but I like to think (or at least hope) the presence of GCP staff on HN, Stack Overflow, and in any other community we happen to be part of will in the long run pay off in terms of goodwill.

I am free to comment on posts about GCP here on HN. If there are workarounds, I can post them. If it's a bug I can comment as such and file it internally. I can express opinions as long as they're clearly marked as my own. I didn't have to take any training or end up on a whitelist; Google expressed their faith in my good judgement when they hired me. If nothing else, it was a morale boost to feel trusted to act responsibly.

At the other end of the spectrum, GCP has started building out in terms of large-scale engagement. Cloud has been a big part of Google I/O; now there's GCP NEXT as a Cloud-specific user conference: https://cloudplatformonline.com/NEXT2016.html. Building more in this space seems easier to me than a cultural change which encourages (rather than prohibits) customer and community engagement on the individual level, but perhaps I'm being naïve.

[0]: I currently work at Google on Compute Engine; I formerly worked at Amazon, although not on AWS.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#237
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#238
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.

Hi pdknsk,

I'm a Product Manager on App Engine and wanted to reach out and say that 100% we are invested in app engine and are working to make it your favorite platform. For example, we heard that GAE documentation needs enhancements and we've kicked off a large project to do just this. It's an ongoing effort as you can imagine, but please take a look at the new landing page and managed VM content as well as the left-hand nav reorg we did. Here is the link. More to come of course.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs

Please give the new set of docs a try and please give us feedback when you see errors or generally when the content is not up to par with what you expect. There is a feedback tool on the top right hand side of every page.

Thank you! Amir

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#239

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.

Who's upper management? As I mentioned in another thread, we acquired Diane Greene's company so that she would run Cloud and Apps at Google, back in November:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/technology/google-picks-di...

and Sundar (CEO) and Ruth (CFO) mentioned Cloud a lot on Alphabet's most recent earnings call. I'm not disagreeing that AWS is massively important to Amazon, but to say that Google (and Alphabet) aren't serious about Cloud is incorrect.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#240

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…

Would you have said the same thing about Amazon when they started AWS? "Data centers aren't their core business: retail is".
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