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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

#291

Post by mastazi »

dkubb wrote: post #206

(Serious question) Isn't it risky to rely on any Google product as a foundation for your business? They've shut down more popular services that people depend on than Google Cloud. They tend to enter a market, undercut all the competitors, and then once they are dominant in the niche they terminate or change the service in a way that makes it not fulfill the original promise.

Well Amazon killed the Fire Phone though ;-) https://fortune.com/2015/09/09/amazon-killing-fire-phone/

Jokes aside, probably you are thinking about free products like Google Reader, because this:

> once they are dominant in the niche they terminate or change the service

would not make any sense if the product in question makes $$$

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#292

Post by jhgg »

jpatokal wrote: post #289
jhgg wrote: post #275

At work we moved to GCE at the beginning of this year, from Linode after they were having stability issues over the christmas break. No complaints from us. So far have been very happy with it. We were considering moving to AWS, but to realize the same pricing as GCE we'd have to purchase reserved instances - the sustained usage discounts have been huge for us. Additional things we liked: - gcs is way more responsive…

Billing support is provided for free to all customers. If you had trouble with a particular ticket, please feel free to ping me. Disclaimer: I work in Cloud Support.

Thanks for the reply! I don't remember the specific issue, but we had a billing inquiry and were told we had to upgrade to a paid support plan to get an answer.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#293

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.

To your first point though, streaming services typically are more focused on storage and egress (network) optimizations. App Engine has integration points with each, but its core workloads fall more in the dynamic web app and mobile backend realm. Within Spotify's architecture, there are places where App Engine makes sense (e.g. hosting their frontend APIs). That said, this is small relative to the rest of their architecture and understandably isn't the first area of focus when you're making a move to a new vendor.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#294

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

This is also my impression of Google compute offerings, but it's also my impression of AWS offerings.

I mean, when people think of AWS services, do "service and stability" really come to mind? IME it's impossible to reach a person unless you're a multi-million-dollar org, and Amazon itself tells customers that AWS services can go down at any time and it's up to the customer to architect the application to deal with it.

If I had to peg a reason AWS gets treated differently in the marketplace, I think it's probably some combination of a) AWS was first to market, and b) AWS revenue seems materially important to Amazon, while Google Compute revenue is a rounding error to Alphabet. Therefore, Amazon has a lot more incentive to keep, maintain, and grow AWS.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#296

Post by dundun »

icaromedeiros wrote: post #25

I was wondering about Spotify's contributions to Hadoop stack such as Snakebite and Luigi. What will happen to these projects if they're moving to BigQuery?

Nothing in this move should affect contributions of Snakebite and Luigi. If anything, it will just make them easier to use with cloud environments in addition to bare metal.

With over 20K jobs/day, Hadoop will be a part of Spotify's data processing stack for quite a while. BigQuery is just a (awesome) piece of the full puzzle.

[spotifier]

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#297

Post by e12e »

cstejerean wrote: post #263
S4M wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you see: http://uk.businessinsider.com/talia-jane-fired-yelp-eat24-2-... ?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#298

Post by jsmthrowaway »

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…

Great answer. Has the acronym "IANAL" ever been tested in court in such a way, to your knowledge? Now you have me curious, and that'd honestly be quite amusing.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#299

Post by tomdec »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #283
boulos wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old App Engine / API / Admin console era is over. All tasks have been migrated to https://console.cloud.google.com/ including some of the last App Engine specific administration things.

Slightly off-topic, but not too off-topic question: Does GCE have a text format for its configuration? My pet peeve with cloud services and their web-based admin GUIs is that you have to use the GUI or the APIs to do anything. You can't capture the current configuration and then replay it if anything is misconfigured. You can't save or restore the config. You can't diff the config across versions. Most SaaSes don't e…

Perhaps you want to look at something like Hashicorp's Terraform (https://www.terraform.io/) which will do most, if not all, of what you're looking for.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#300

Post by jsmthrowaway »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #127
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…

I wonder how big you'd have to be to get a real SLA from Google, Azure, or AWS. I imagine 25% off your hosting bill doesn't really cut it for those companies running millions of dollars in revenue through it.

I've had admin on an account that did about half a million USD on AWS monthly in the past; we cut it down a lot by expanding physically and going in hard on reserved instances, but my view into things started around there. I'm unsure if we ever attempted to negotiate a SLA, but we paid for premium support just like you (despite having a dedicated, and great, sales rep) and got kickback credits from the general SLA policy[0] just like you. Nothing special.

If anybody has a special deal, it's probably Netflix. I suspect even half a million monthly is a smaller account to Amazon.

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/historical/ specifically, not the current (better) one

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