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Moving The New York Times Games Platform to Google App Engine

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

#141

Post by awj »

bastawhiz wrote: post #61
mattbillenstein wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why people are so enamored with ELB -- just terminate SSL at your web boxes using nginx and publish the public ips of all of these machines in your DNS records. You remove a bunch of ELB per-request costs doing it this way and you can scale it however you see fit.

That works great until a machine starts failing health checks and you need to take it out of rotation ASAP. It's also the case that DNS gets cached and not all users create the same load: one user making many requests will burden one server instead of having the load evenly distributed.

> It's also the case that DNS gets cached and not all users create the same load

It's also, also the case that DNS gets cached and propagating the removal of a broken server could take ages.

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

#143

Post by bpicolo »

funkjunky wrote: post #139
bpicolo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heya, Thanks for the link! You're right that this is what I was looking for. Unfortunately, that hadn't shown up in a convenient place while I was googling around. Would be good to add direct links to those from the client lib references, because those pop up for e.g. "google storage python" first. (Unless they're already there and I didn't see them). Links from the READMEs of the repo might be useful too to help peo…

That's not a bad idea, I'll bring it up with our client library maintainers today.

Of course not :)

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

#144

Post by azinman2 »

azinman2 wrote: post #60
theDoug wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)/¯

I’m now realizing this might have come off as sarcasm. It wasn’t! I was buzzed from the game when I wrote this lol!

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

#145

Post by spyspy »

londons_explore wrote: post #119
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.

I think it depends on the nature of your spike. AppEngine instances can typically start in 30 seconds or so. So if your spike is because your video went viral on facebook and lots of people are looking it it, that's fine. If your spike is because you have 10 million clients with an app set to do an HTTP request at exactly 10:00:00pm, and they all arrive within a quarter second, thats a problem.

30 seconds is actually a gross overestimate for AE startup. Your description of our problem is very accurate, though. We still need to over-provision just before the spike, which we do with a cron that scales up to several hundred instances 5 minutes before 10pm and then back down to normal levels 5 minutes after. Autoscaling takes care of the rest.

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

#146

Post by wutwutwutwut »

mattmanser wrote: post #128
wutwutwutwut wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Azure all the time (app services, storage, cloud services,VMs, SQL, CDN etc) and almost never run into this issue. Can you share some example on what you mean?

I use all that stuff and constantly run into it, are you using it in anger? Here's a few I can remember off the top of my head: - A (relatively) huge 6ms lag between the website and the DB - One (random) site will mysteriously max out on memory on app-pool startup and take all the others down - Their scheduler has no concept of timezones - Their scheduler uses your local time when setting up the job, but UTC for othe…

No I'm using it happily. We don't use the scheduler and create new deployment slots when deploying (which maybe prevents locking issues). Sometimes I experience oddness in Azure portal and has to refresh but has never had it slow down. As for SQL latency it's been insignificant to us so I'm not sure if what we experience is better or worse than yours.

Portal i agree is partly confusing/messy but we set up things once and then do deploys via CI infrastructure. And even the initial setup we try to automate using PS instead (to make it reproducible).

When it comes to pricing I agree, but my laptop does not do multi-datacenter so well.

Im not questioning anything you say of course. Maybe I've gone blind or don't see the issues as critical as you, or maybe I'm just more lucky.

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

#147

Post by robotmay »

funkjunky wrote: post #138
robotmay wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was super keen to switch to GCP (for cost saving etc) but this mirrors a lot of my experiences. Deploys to App Engine took 20 minutes, not 2 minutes, and I have absolutely no faith in their firewall settings actually working. I have no idea what the problem is, but it's basically impossible to boot a Rancher master node on Compute Engine. Even with all ports open. In the end I just bailed on the platform as a whole…

App Engine Flex takes a long time to deploy, and always has. App Engine standard is what deploys quickly, and also scales quicker. Firewall settings work just fine for our platinum clients with complex network architectures, I don't see why it wouldn't in your case unless something was misconfigured.

Isn't Flex the newer of the platforms? Is there a reason why it's so slow to deploy? I deployed an app via it that deploys in a couple of minutes anywhere else, including build time, but it took an insane amount of time on GAE, and I never managed to find a good reason why.

Normally I'd think I had configured something wrong, except in this case it was insanely simple. A network label that allows all ports both ingress and egress, to any destination/source, definitely applied to the servers, and yet they had constant connection issues with each other.

It probably was something I did, but the combination of those issues, surprise egress bills, very laggy UI, and various other little niggles just made it not worth my time for now. I'm keen to avoid vendor lock-in anyway, so GCP and AWS don't have that many extra features over smaller providers for me.

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

#148

Post by iamgopal »

rhodysurf wrote: post #132
kennethh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explains it, would be nice if they could write it down somewhere as a feature:)

Its free for custom but only to use existing certs. You still have to set up the cert and such with your domain as you normally would. You also get the *.appengine.com domain with automatic SSL>

SSL cert provided by Google is free and is in private alpha stage. It's coming soon with GA.

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

#149

Post by funkjunky »

bpicolo wrote: post #143
funkjunky wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a bad idea, I'll bring it up with our client library maintainers today.

Of course not :)

It's up there right at the top of the README:

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-python

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

#150

Post by sunsetMurk »

BoorishBears wrote: post #117
sunsetMurk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or a passionate user who had a great experience?! I love finding solutions which require less 'square peg round hole'. Unfortunately, rare these days when piecing together a stack w/ the myriad of platforms/frameworks/etc.

I'm usually not skeptical of comments but this comment definitely feels "artificial". I think Google has better things to do than to pay people to comment on HN, but I do think either this person is trying too hard to sell us on Google Cloud because they like it (which isn't a bad thing per say) Edit: I thought about it and they probably aren't related to it, probably just really enthusiastic about it (good thing) bu…

Yep - I guess I'm a bit empathic to the comment. I'm always trying to sell what I'm using to others, to get more into that camp, to generate more discussion and innovation. But, it's all just like ice cream [1] anyways.

1- https://twitter.com/adamlaz/status/900621343347146752

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