Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

news.spotify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 397 posts

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#241

Post by [deleted] »

010a wrote: post #240
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…

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

[deleted]

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#242

Post by zenlikethat »

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.

Recommendation algorithms and models don't do you any good if you don't have users.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#243

Post by toomuchtodo »

010a wrote: post #240
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…

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

Yes. But, Amazon is known for their customer service, even in the AWS space. Google is not.

If Google wants to succeed in certain spaces, they need to commit to them for a duration, and evangelize them. I don't see them doing that anywhere as well as Amazon does with AWS.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#244

Post by nemothekid »

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…

>since when do you NEED to spend less than 30% of your take home on rent to survive?

While on one side the 3x rent rule might be just "good sense", most places won't consider you if your salary (or the salary of all tenants) isn't 3x your rent.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#245

Post by nickbauman »

boulos wrote: post #239
nickbauman wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) a…

My clients' upper management. It's a common sentiment as you can see from other threads in this post. Google has a persistent credibility problem in the cloud services market. It drives me crazy (full disc: I'm a GCP certified engineer and I work 100% in AWS. I really miss AppEngine, BigQuery and Datastore.)

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#246

Post by laxk »

nrh wrote: post #210
KaiserPro wrote: post #130

Sorry but spotify's infrastructure is not a shiny beacon of correctness. They've compounded mistake upon "Oooshiny lets use that" here is a post where someone dissects spotify's infrastructure bit by bit: http://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/docker-and-you/ This isn't an anti google compute, its got some really great features. But, spotify's backend infrastructure ain't one Yes, I appreciate that that post is from…

Spotifier here. For the record, I hate puppet with the fiery intensity of a thousand suns. It's also pretty hard to magically make go away. I could probably do a whole talk on why puppet is difficult to kill, it's the kudzu of config management. I think it is the worst. We've got our warts and a pile of tech debt, and I wouldn't want anyone to think otherwise. Containers are a part of a long-term strategy to get away…

Is there any public available information where we can read about deployment process in the company?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#247

Post by agentgt »

I have some questions based on previous experience many moons ago experience (3 or 4 yrs).

When I tried to port some of our platform to AppEngine I had some issues with various Java libraries (writing tmp files, opening sockets, etc). Once I sort of got past that and used some of Googles own APIs (which is sort of annoying that I had to couple my stuff) I had timeout issues. See we have to integrate with all these enterprise third parties (SOAP/REST) and these guys can be really slow. We also couldn't use our own pub/sub (AMQP/RabbitMQ) so that was going to have to be ported as well.

Things must have changed because its hard for me to imagine Spotify being able to get all their needs met on a rather coupling platform.

* How does one write code for Google Cloud while being agnostic of Google Cloud?

* Maybe appengine supports AMQP?

* Or maybe the container engine fixes these problems? (ie need something more custom run it in a docker image).

Our current platform runs on Rackspace and Digital Ocean. These guys are IaaS so your basically doing DevOps which is a pain... but Rackspace does have kick ass customer service.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#249

Post by cramsdale »

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.

True that Google stills uses it internally, but external usage exists way beyond Snapchat (although they are a fun customer). App Engine hasn't been in maintenance mode, although we have set aside engineering cycles to improve the reliability and stability of the service in order to ensure the highest level of support for production-grade customers. In tandem, we've some large features such Go, PHP, full-text search, and Cloud Storage support. We've added integration with the Cloud Console as well as Cloud SDK to allow developers to build hybrid solutions that span, for example, App Engine and Compute Engine. And, yes, we've invested in the App Engine Managed VM environment with a host of new runtimes including Java 8, Python 3, Go, PHP, and Node.js. We have more coming there over the next 2-3 months. Guido leaving was tough, I used to share an office with him. That said, I'm not sure that his exit was the writing on the wall.

Disclaimer: I'm the lead for the App Engine product team.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#250

Post by chm »

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)…

I assume your business is GearLaunch? If so, why do I need to enable javascript just to see the landing page, which is just a logo...? I'm curious if this was intended, or a consequence of the framework you're using (e.g. Meteor).

Edit: It seems to be on purpose, with the use of noscript tags.

Post reply on HN