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Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

open.nytimes.com

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Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#31

Post by gtaylor »

g09980 wrote: post #18
tyingq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "inelastic" might have been a shot at AWS. When pressed, the AWS people do use phrases like "pre-warming", "over provisioning" and "advance notice" around their ELB/ALB setup and ECS. Google's cloud salespeople pitch that they don't require any of that.

Curious if the need for pre-warming ELB/ALB still applies. Last time this came up, an AWS employee mentioned it is no longer necessary ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052079 ), but would be nice if this was documented.

It definitely still applies.

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#32

Post by bpicolo »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #14
bpicolo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using google bits recently. I agree that the docs for e.g. all the python sdks need a lot of work. That said, boto3 has thorough docs, but I wouldn't consider them particularly well organized. I can only really navigate AWS sdk docs because I already know what I want to do, and can google the specific terminology

Are you talking about this Python SDK doc? https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/google-cloud-python/la...

Yeah. In particular, I was really looking for something for "here's how to do most of the basics for Cloud Storage".

If you look at https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/google-cloud-python/la..., for example, there's not even a top level navigation index that I can read through to guess what function I might need by name.

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#33

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Jedi72 wrote: post #25

Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else.

Google likely offers significant discounts to companies which write these sorts of pieces for them. And obviously a lot of Googlers participate actively here, so getting upvotes naturally is likely not a challenge.

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#34

Post by theDoug »

Jedi72 wrote: post #25

Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else.

We actually spent the entire day at the Giants game today. ¯\(ツ)/¯

There's no incentive for high ranking HN posts, or any HN posts, actually. If there were, you wouldn't see others continually submit our news here before we do. This was a nice and unprompted post for everyone in GCP to read, as well.

(Disclosure: I work on GCP as a product marketer.)

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#35

Post by look_lookatme »

obulpathi wrote: post #30
fha wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS . . . does not scale well GCP may have some advantages over AWS, but the reverse is also true and it's hard to take what you say seriously when you say something like that.

Adding more context. Sorry for missing it out in first place. I mostly work in Big Data Space. Google Clouds Big Data stuff is built for Streaming / Storing / Processing / Querying / Machine Learning at Internet Scale data (PubSub / Bigtable / Dataflow / BigQuery / Cloud ML). AWS scales to terabyte level loads. But, beyond that, its hard and super costly. Google's services autoscale to Petabyte levels / millions of u…

You need petabyte scale for the NYT Crossword?

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#36

Post by nrjames »

I migrated a big data stack to GCP from AWS. Reasons: GCP has better documentation, the AWS console and various services confuse the heck out of me (I guess I'm getting too old), and the security integration between GCP services saves a huge amount of time. It's super easy and very fast to used the Google Compute Engine VMs. Given that the company I work for uses G Suite, it's a piece of cake to implement SSO and other integration pieces. It's also cheaper for us than AWS and more performant.

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#37

Post by theDoug »

tziki wrote: post #7
vs2 wrote: post #2

"Due to the inelastic architecture of our AWS system, we needed to have the systems scaled up to handle our peak traffic at 10PM when the daily puzzle is published." WT... I had to reread this to make sure I didnt misunderstand... why not work on making the current arhictecture elastic?! #cloudPorn

The main story here is probably this line: "The system is generally at that peak traffic for only a few minutes a day". AWS charges by hour. Google by minute. If your peak traffic only last a few minutes, hourly billing is inflexible, simple as that.

Hourly billing is also equally inflexible if you need 61 minutes, or 74, or 110- paying 120 for any of those isn't too rad.

(Disclosure: I work on GCP)

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#38

Post by boulos »

Jedi72 wrote: post #25

Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else.

The first statement is partially true (it's certainly nice) but that's true of any marketing team. To be clear, I don't think the NYT people were pushed to do this. Engineering blogs commonly say what they did to take pride in their work. I'm not in marketing, so I don't know if we we're involved. Maybe they sent it over for review, but I kind of doubt it. (To the comment below, we don't pay people for content, and it's demeaning to the engineers at NYT to suggest that).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (as an engineer, not in marketing, despite how I like HN).

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#39

Post by ucaetano »

boulos wrote: post #38
Jedi72 wrote: post #25

Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else.

The first statement is partially true (it's certainly nice) but that's true of any marketing team. To be clear, I don't think the NYT people were pushed to do this. Engineering blogs commonly say what they did to take pride in their work. I'm not in marketing, so I don't know if we we're involved. Maybe they sent it over for review, but I kind of doubt it. (To the comment below, we don't pay people for content, and i…

> Engineering blogs commonly say what they did to take pride in their work

Yep, engineering blogs are also marketing, aimed right at HN readers. Attracting good engineering talent isn't easy, so companies have to do marketing on that front as well.

But, as usual, people being marketed to (in this case, HN readers) don't realize they are being marketed to.

Re: Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

#40

Post by vgt »

boulos wrote: post #38
Jedi72 wrote: post #25

Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else.

The first statement is partially true (it's certainly nice) but that's true of any marketing team. To be clear, I don't think the NYT people were pushed to do this. Engineering blogs commonly say what they did to take pride in their work. I'm not in marketing, so I don't know if we we're involved. Maybe they sent it over for review, but I kind of doubt it. (To the comment below, we don't pay people for content, and i…

I sometimes ask Google Cloud clients who post this type of stuff, what's your motivation? The one consistent theme is that telling the world that you're doing cool stuff with cool tech raises your organization's profile and helps in recruitment.

From my experience working with NY Times they are certainly a top-notch engineering organization. They should be free to advertise that.

I don't know if these engineers are being forced to release these types of blogs, but the far more likely (and respectful to said engineers) scenario is that they just want to talk about their work. This isn't the first time NY Times has done this [0][1].

(Work at Google Cloud on same team as boulos and worked with NY Times on some of their migration pieces like BigQuery)

[0] https://thenewstack.io/caching-hadoop-new-york-times-embrace...

[1] https://open.nytimes.com/faster-simpler-workflow-analytical-...

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