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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

#391

Post by jsolson »

eco wrote: post #309
jsolson wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My issue was resolved eventually (took about a month with one week lag in their replies and it was me who figured out what was going on, not the support). It looks like the App Engine documentation was finally fixed. It used to say "If you do not specify a class, F1 is assigned by default." as recently as a few months ago. For a long time the default was actually F1. Then one day my costs went up unexpectedly. The de…

Thank you for taking the time to write up the experience. I can think of a few metrics that directly relate to what made it suboptimal. Google is pretty good at improving things when we have metrics we can measure directly.

That said, this falls into that category of things where I can tell you "I'll follow up with the teams involved" but it's unlikely I'll be able to say more than that (unless any result makes it into a public blog post or something).

I will do what I can, though.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#392

Post by lisbakke »

rtpg wrote: post #340
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.

They've killed APIs/Products, but they've almost always given a very long amount of time to transition.

Regardless of if you get 4 months notice or 1 year notice you still have to do the work to migrate and you're still stuck with the sunk cost of investing in/learning a doomed platform.

That's why I wouldn't build a business on Google, because they have a long history of killing things when they aren't wildly profitable/successful. A $10m/yr profit product is considered a distraction of valuable engineer time unless it has some ulterior goal for the company.

And I'm not saying they should change -- they do what's right for them. One engineer working on some distraction project could instead be moved to ads quality and end up making a change worth anywhere from hundreds of millions/yr to billions.

But they can't have their cake and eat it.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#393

Post by TheIronYuppie »

waffle_ss wrote: post #85
crb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are vendors running managed Postgres services on Google Cloud Platform, like ElephantSQL [1] and Aiven [2]. And you can of course run your own on GCE, even to the extent of 24/7 commercial support - you can run EnterpriseDB from Cloud Launcher [3]. And, you can also run Kubernetes on AWS - we have a group focused on making sure it's an excellent experience. I work for Google Cloud Platform; ping me if you'd lik…

> There are vendors running managed Postgres services on Google Cloud Platform, like ElephantSQL I did check out ElephantSQL but my pricing needs are somewhere between their $100 and $20 plans and there seems to be a lack of configurability compared to RDS's parameter groups (e.g. enabling extensions). > you can also run Kubernetes on AWS I've had success turning up Kubernetes clusters on AWS for demo purposes, but I…

We also just had a user check in a cloud formation template for Kubernetes on AWS - would that meet your needs? (No kube-up.sh required)

Disclosure: I work on GKE and Kubernetes at Google

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#394

Post by chrisan »

nkw wrote: post #378
chrisan wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty eye opening. Curious if you have looked at AWS with a similar regard, are they any better?

Not any better, arguably worse: https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ "We may change, discontinue, or deprecate any of the Service Offerings (including the Service Offerings as a whole) or change or remove features or functionality of the Service Offerings from time to time. We will notify you of any material change to or discontinuation of the Service Offerings." "We may terminate this Agreement for any reason by provid…

Ha, yikes! Thanks for the highlights. I'm guessing Azure has similar (or any IaaS company) leaving us to basically go on trust of the company to support their offerings long term.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#395

Post by lobster_johnson »

crb wrote: post #50
waffle_ss wrote: post #16

I tried Google Container Engine (GKE) and really liked it - it's the best cloud solution for deploying Docker to production in my opinion, mainly due to its use of Kubernetes. Unfortunately in my Web apps I make heavy use of Postgres-specific features, and since Cloud SQL only supports MySQL, Google Cloud is a total non-starter for me. So for now I'm on AWS, using Postgres on RDS and deploying containers with ECS. EC…

There are vendors running managed Postgres services on Google Cloud Platform, like ElephantSQL [1] and Aiven [2]. And you can of course run your own on GCE, even to the extent of 24/7 commercial support - you can run EnterpriseDB from Cloud Launcher [3]. And, you can also run Kubernetes on AWS - we have a group focused on making sure it's an excellent experience. I work for Google Cloud Platform; ping me if you'd lik…

I sincerely hope you will add PostgreSQL support to CloudSQL soon.

The current Postgres offerings are not great. ElephantSQL is extremely expensive compared to their offering: 4 cores, 15GB RAM, 1TB data for $1,000/mo. CloudSQL (2nd gen) with the exact same specs would be $370/mo. Aiven doesn't advertise exact prices until you sign up, so I can't compare, but I see that the number of instances (max 3 nodes) is very small, so not really an option.

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#396

Post by latchkey »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #389
latchkey wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The…

"hipster arrogance." Ha. I'm 42, got my first email address in 1991 and hardly a hipster. I own a fixie because I used to race on velodromes.

What is the word for people who use the internet in some purposely crippled fashion, just so that they can complain about things not working for them? =)

Re: Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud

#397

Post by tschellenbach »

nrh wrote: post #150
shockzzz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I don't think they have to directly attack anyone. It's just a matter of tradeoffs - here are the things the Google Cloud gets us, here's a specific example that hones it in, and here's why that's critical to our business. At the moment, the blog post just says, "Yay we moved to the cloud" and threw out some marketing buzzwords. It should be beyond a shadow of doubt that they got a lower price as a result. Tha…

Spotifier here. Frankly, price is not the biggest factor in a decision like this. If we were going for the lowest cost cloud option, it probably wouldn't be either AWS or Google - there are other providers who are hungrier for business that would be willing to do deep cuts at our scale. The way we think about this is that there are basically two classes of cloud services: commodities and differentiated services. Comm…

Are you dropping Cassandra?
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