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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

#261
We host a lot of our applications on Google Compute Engine but have had many issues with even simple features available from other cloud providers. For example, Google's HTTP(S) Load Balancer offering does not support SNI [1], HTTP to HTTPS forwarding [2], or sticky sessions [3], making it unusable for us. The support we pay for has been pretty helpful, but all we hear is "we have a feature request for this but I cannot provide an ETA on when and if this will be implemented". Many of the issues in the Compute Engine public issue tracker [4] haven't been updated in many months or over a year in some cases. Additionally, it can be very confusing finding out which beta services can only be accessed via the gcloud tool and not the web console. Without the ability to even schedule a window for maintenance on our VMs, we often feel like we do not have the control we need over our hosting environment. Please increase your transparency around addressing Google Cloud issues, all the Docker updates have been great, but many of these issues are over a year old and still show-stoppers for some users. Thanks again for churning out new features/services constantly, but please help close out some of these older feature requests!

[1] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai... [2] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai... [3] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai... [4] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/list

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppEngine is Google Cloud Platform's PaaS offering. Its the oldest product on Google Cloud Platform, but its not one of the ones mentioned that Spotify is using (the Spotify post doesn't talk much about the products, but Google's [0] does.) The Google Cloud Platform services they are identified as using are: Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Bigtable, Direct Peering, Cloud VPN, Cloud Router, Cloud…

I guess they are not entirely on Google Cloud but rather their data warehousing / big data stuff is now?/going? to be on GCP. I don't really call big data processing "backend" but rather the microservices the backend. Its not clear to me if those are going to be ported over or if they are already. Does spotify plan on porting everything over or just the heavy computing? A detailed techy case study I hope will follow…

> I guess they are not entirely on Google Cloud but rather their data warehousing / big data stuff is now?/going? to be on GCP.

I don't know why you would guess that: the Google announcement indicates that the migration has both a "services" track and a "data" track. And Spotify's announcement certainly seems to indicate that they are moving off of their own datacenters, onto Google Cloud Platform, and not in a limited way.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#263
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to see your lovely face in the office every day. =)

Man, you should consider remote options at least for the Customer Success given how low you're paying (is $50K really livable in San Francisco?).

If you think it's hard to live on $50K salary in San Francisco you should think about how everyone else in the service industry supporting all those tech workers manage to live on minimum wage or barely above that. Think about the people serving lunch, or making coffee, or cleaning offices, etc. Where do they live and how can they afford to be in the city every day at less than half of $50K per year? Working remotely isn't an option for them either.

If it's truly prohibitive for a single person to live in SF for $50K per year then we should be really concerned about the families that earn $50K from two minimum wage jobs, and need to support 1 to 2 children on top of it.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and I'm assuming you've got some killer rent control, or some other non-scalable, non-replicable housing situation. That's neat for you, but it's meaningless to anybody else.

I signed the lease in the past two years. So rent control has kicked in once. I have a room in a shared apartment. There are plenty of open rooms on Craigslist for similar rents. I'm not saying life will be great but it's entirely possible to live in the city on $50k/yr.

Most adults do not consider having a "room in a shared apartment" to be adequate. A living wage allows you to rent/mortgage a place of your own. What I'm hearing is that $50k is not a living wage.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#266
post #199

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 :(

> I wish they had the same exuberance about their support tickets :(

Is there a particular ticket (or tickets) you ran into trouble with? I can try to follow up.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#267

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 en…

Adding to what dragonwriter said, we now have an IaaS offering (Compute Engine) that launched publicly in 2013. You get raw virtual machines letting you be agnostic of Google Cloud's particular offerings.

If you're looking for "just run my app" but with a bit more customization / flexibility than App Engine (like running your own RabbitMQ) then yes, Container Engine (https://cloud.google.com/container-engine) is our hosted Kubernetes offering. You don't need to manage with the VMs yourself, just choose a cluster size and go.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not really App Engine or Container Engine (but I'm familiar with them all).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#268
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.

Not sure if this has changed in the last few years, but Khan Academy heavily invested in App Engine: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkb...

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#269
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to see your lovely face in the office every day. =)

Man, you should consider remote options at least for the Customer Success given how low you're paying (is $50K really livable in San Francisco?).

$50k is livable, but on the other hand you have to live In a city full of people who don't shut up about the Internet. I'd say that's a definite net loss.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they are not entirely on Google Cloud but rather their data warehousing / big data stuff is now?/going? to be on GCP. I don't really call big data processing "backend" but rather the microservices the backend. Its not clear to me if those are going to be ported over or if they are already. Does spotify plan on porting everything over or just the heavy computing? A detailed techy case study I hope will follow…

> I guess they are not entirely on Google Cloud but rather their data warehousing / big data stuff is now?/going? to be on GCP. I don't know why you would guess that: the Google announcement indicates that the migration has both a "services" track and a "data" track. And Spotify's announcement certainly seems to indicate that they are moving off of their own datacenters, onto Google Cloud Platform, and not in a limit…

So... basically nothing is live yet? Are you from Google? Is anything live. I admit I got confused by the OP title: "Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud".
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