Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

open.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 152 posts

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

#51

Post by joatmon-snoo »

look_lookatme wrote: post #35
obulpathi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The impression I'm getting is not that GCP scales better, but it scales with less fuss - the anecdotes here all suggest that with AWS, once you hit any meaningful load (i.e. gigabytes), you need to start fiddling with stuff.

I don't know if this is actually true, I've never done any serious work in AWS.

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

#52

Post by joatmon-snoo »

vgt wrote: post #40
boulos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I imagine the resulting discussion may also open the team's eyes to alternatives that others have succeeded and failed with, which in turn helps the team in further refining their process.

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

#54

Post by tomcam »

obulpathi wrote: post #26
CharlesW wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Also… > AWS is too low level It seems very strange to paint AWS with such a broad brush, considering that AWS has tons of services at various levels of abstraction (including high-level abstractions like Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda).

Sorry to not add context. I was referring to the use case the author of article was talking about: running a website: You need to stitch: ELB / EC2 / Database / Caching / Service Splitting / Auth / Scaling / ... Where as on Google Cloud, App Engine covers most of the points.

Jeez, you're taking a lot of hits. Thanks for the patient answers

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

#57

Post by bastawhiz »

sb8244 wrote: post #50
ben_jones wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A GCP product marketer responding to negative commentary on HN within ~20 minutes of it being posted strikes me as automated. EDIT: It is a double standard though, HN readers want access and responses from people on the GCP team but at the same time tinfoil hat subliminal marketing etc.

I would be reading this every 10 minutes for new comments if it was my product up for discussion.

Ten minutes even seems like a lot. If I saw my website on HN, I'd have alerts set up for new comments.

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

#58

Post by jsudhams »

nrjames wrote: post #36

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 oth…

Wait until GCP becomes older with bigquery and other versions. Also GCP does not have regions ready and it takes forever to get a new region. Waiting for Mumbai region for more than 3 to 4 months now.

But one thing i like about GCP is that it allows to the limit setting in terms of cost and ensure you wont cross it. In case of AWS it can give alerts but for some reason say all you team in in one location and there is emergency like flood etc and you dont check email then you are done. I stopped using AWS after i learned that there is simply no way to set limit. Waiting for GCP to open their Mumbai region. sigh.

Also AWS is very deceiving with free tier , there is simply no way to understand which products get free and worst case is after free tier you will get charged.

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

#59

Post by bastawhiz »

tziki wrote: post #17
random023987 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS lambda charges by the 1/10th of a GB/CPU/second. I'd bet they could have seen significant cost savings on AWS by migrating to lambda, and gotten continuous scaling to boot.

Serverless is probably far too immature for companies like NYT.

I don't disagree with you, but it's also true that you don't have to go all-in. I run services that run server-ful-ly on EC2, while requests to the "front-end" are handled by Lambda. If you've got one or two very hot endpoints and the majority of your server load spike is thanks to the processing for those endpoints, moving just those endpoints to Lambda could give you reassurance that you don't have all of your eggs in one basket (not having to go full-serverless) while also getting the benefit of being able to scale up and down essentially effortlessly.

Of course, there are lots of other consideration that you should be making when going even partially serverless, and it could be that the NYT chose not to experiment with Lambda for other reasons. For instance, you're effectively tied to CloudWatch for logging and monitoring, which could be a deal-breaker. Much of the processing could be happening in the DB, which would make Lambda moot. It may simply be that their estimated usage of Lambda was too costly.

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

#60

Post by azinman2 »

theDoug wrote: post #34
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.)

Hey I was at the giants game today with my company as well! ¯\(ツ)/¯

Post reply on HN