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Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

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381–390 of 397 posts

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#381
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is $1,500 much better?

Much, much better.

A reasonable approximation is to target no more than 25% of your take home for housing, but you can probably survive closer to 50% for a while if you must. So for 50k, you're looking at something like $800 - $1600 being manageable. You'd be much better off near the other end of the range.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#382
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, our native egress pricing is higher. We've chosen to partner with folks like CloudFlare for what we call CDN Interconnect ( https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect ) although this was a somewhat recent announcement. As far as GCS pricing goes (rather than egress), I think we've been more cautious on the "cost per op" but really led again on cost per byte. This was especially true when we l…

CDN interconnect is just a bonus :). I prefer GCS having competitive pricing and features since it will be one fewer service to manage. Also cloudflare is a bit confusing. We only want to serve assets and we serve 3TB per month and I'm not sure if cloudflare is OK with that usage in its free tier option.

I think CloudFlare, Fastly, et al. are all happy to have you serve 3 TiB per month. Their hope is that you grow and upgrade to their paid plans one day.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#383

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.

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.

So you're deferring your worry?

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#384
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is 2016 and ok to run JavaScript, the Internet works much better with it. I promise not to hack your flip phone. =)

I run three browsers with varying levels of "openness". It just happened that I visited your website while using NoScript. Turned it off for your site, but I was only greeted by a logo. So my interest was genuine - not trying to be snarky. Why do you force JS to show a logo? And I also don't really know what your company does...

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#385
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be a pattern: wimpy mobile endpoint devices drive everything to the cloud. If so this is perhaps a dated phenomenon. Moore's Law is still a thing and today's generation of mobile devices are getting fatter and fatter.

The only reason mobile clients can't be peers is due to the metered network usage.

data transmission from mobile is energy-hungry. More so than compute.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're out of touch. It might not be common for families, but it's very common for young adults to share an apartment. And you're trivializing what activists are trying to do when they talk about making sure people have a "living wage."

As an only slightly older adult, let me assure you that after years of petty arguments, no-fault evictions, playing Craigslist roulette for new roommates, sitting in massive group interviews to compete for a room, other people's animals ruining your shit, etc. ad nauseum, "a room in a shared apartment" will stop being an acceptable option. I never thought I would get there either. Just give it time.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#387
post #375

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)…

Better sales story AND marketing. Look at the names themselves CloudStorage Vs Redshift/s3, ComputeEngine Vs EC2. Cookies vs. Oreo. AWS service names are a brand in themselves while Google service names are too generic.

We internally use our three letter acronyms all the time: GCS, GCE, GAE, GKE (which itself is a pretty clever joke about the K being for Kubernetes).

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#388

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).

I wouldn't judge a competitive threat solely on a V1 implementation, given it's from a company with engineering chops like Amazon.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#389
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is 2016 and ok to run JavaScript, the Internet works much better with it. I promise not to hack your flip phone. =)

It's 2016 and Hacker News, this very site, works fine w/o JS (except for search). That's how I'm using it right now. That's how I've always used it.

I can access most of the sites I routinely visit without JS. E.g. The New York Times works better w/o JS because it doesn't block articles or count how many I've read.

And I don't really care if you you will or will not try to hack me if I visit your site with JS on. There are countless other sites who will try exactly that, so why shouldn't my default be "NO"? And if it's not the sites themselves, it's the shitty ad networks they all use; I don't trust those at all.

IMO it's the epitome of hipster arrogance to display nothing useful to people w/o JS.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#390
post #295

Om Malik sees it as a first step toward acquisition by Google (or rather, Alphabet). https://twitter.com/om/status/702194246489546752

This has been rumored before. E.g here's a headline from 2014: http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-considers-buying-spotify-...
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