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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

#361

Post by toxik »

lisbakke wrote: post #326
bshanks wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to be facing a trust problem here that its competitors don't, due to its history of shutting down popular services, even those that were being used internally and even those that it had been recently hyping to the press. Due to this unusual context, perhaps it would help if Google were to increase this promise from 1 year to 10 years (or 5 years or 3 years).

Yep. Their trust problem is also very well earned both from the APIs they've killed/changed and from the long list of Google products in the graveyard.

Google App Engine comes to mind. I'm amazed they would kill of such a product at all.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#362

Post by jganetsk »

tschellenbach wrote: post #223
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.

Have you seen Google Cloud Functions? https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs

Disclaimer: Google Cloud Pub/Sub engineer here.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#363

Post by Tehnix »

beatpanda wrote: post #117
dsacco wrote: 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.

I really don't see how you can't live for $4160 - $1200 = $2960 a month? Heck, I could live on $500/month easily (after rent and taxes), if I wanted (as far as I'm aware, living costs are a lot cheaper in the US than were I'm from). That would make my yearly salary $20.400 (ignoring taxes, since I don't know what the rate for US is).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#364

Post by kccqzy »

toxik wrote: post #361
lisbakke wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Their trust problem is also very well earned both from the APIs they've killed/changed and from the long list of Google products in the graveyard.

Google App Engine comes to mind. I'm amazed they would kill of such a product at all.

Google App Engine isn't killed. It's still alive and new features are being added. What are you talking about?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#365

Post by ska »

bskinny129 wrote: post #129
ska wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying $2500/mo for rent alone on a $50k salary is crazy.

That's why no one does it. They have roommates

Sure ... but hopefully not in a studio apartment (as per OP).

It's a real stretch to say 50k is a livable salary in most of the bay area.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#366

Post by ascagnel_ »

balls187 wrote: post #315

I wonder if this has to do with Amazon's streaming music competitor being more of a threat to Spotify than Google's?

Amazon's streaming music competitor is awful. The apps are bad, the web UI is bad, the selection isn't as big, and the audio quality is middle-of-the-pack. In general, it's a "oh right, I have that Amazon service because I have Prime"; a similar comparison would be Prime Video to Netflix.

Spotify is better off in most ways (their desktop app still sucks, but the web UI is better).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#367

Post by matwood »

kccqzy wrote: post #364
toxik wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google App Engine comes to mind. I'm amazed they would kill of such a product at all.

Google App Engine isn't killed. It's still alive and new features are being added. What are you talking about?

The GP was probably referring to the huge price change that effectively killed it for many people.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#368

Post by kyrra »

jasey wrote: post #348
dlgeek wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IME it's impossible to reach a person unless you're a multi-million-dollar org I am sorry to hear that, but I can assure you it's not the case. I'm an engineer on a newer (and therefore smaller) AWS service, and I help investigate customer complaints, from customers of all sizes, all the time. I'll also note that not only do we handle cases that come in via our paid support, we also do deep dives for customers who…

My experience with AWS has been exactly this. I had a Cognito question/issue on IOS that I posted to stack-overflow and got a quick response from an engineer at Amazon. Also I posted a support ticket (zero paid support) to increase my sns API calls limit (which didn't end up being required because I was doing it wrong) and they got back to me over a few days to a week. On the other hand, Google takes my Android app o…

You are comparing 2 very different products. Now if you were comparing play store support to Apple App Store support they would be more in line with each other. Or Googles cloud offerings to AWS.

Play is a low margin business per "customer" compared to cloud. This has direct impact on the type of support you can expect.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#369

Post by matwood »

largote wrote: post #231
bskinny129 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why no one does it. They have roommates

As a grown adult, having roommates is not really an acceptable situation.

What do you count as an adult? I was the weird one by having my own place. Every 'adult' I know had roommates until they found an SO and moved in together and/or got married. These people all made enough money to live alone, but preferred spending money on other things. I also do not live in a super expensive place. A 1br apt. goes for ~1200 in the trendy spots.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#370

Post by flurpitude »

voltagex_ wrote: post #49
flurpitude wrote: post #24

Now how about Spotify fixing their front end so that Premium customers on Android can just hit "play" to play the album they want to play, in the right order? And how about an app in the Windows Store so that you can use it on a touchscreen? And how about some improved metadata that work for classical music? And a way to report corrupt or mistagged tracks and get them fixed? /rant

I'm on mobile so can't directly link you but there's a support form for getting songs fixed.

I have never found a form, but I have found forums where people complain about persistent issues and nothing gets done. They seem to go out of their way to make it difficult for users to report issues. In addition they seem to have contempt for user experience, or they're incompetent at it, or they are under weird nonsensical licensing pressures that require them to make things difficult for their users. Their front ends need an overhaul and they could easily introduce a "flag this track as having a problem" feature.
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