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Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

open.nytimes.com

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Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#51

Post by iamthirsty »

dragonwriter wrote: post #50
iamthirsty wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some . I actually cancelled my subscription with them because of the horrendously large Google Home ads on all the paid crosswords. When I asked them about it I got about four non-answers — it's ridiculous that even if you pay they still serve you ads.

Newspapers have always included ads even if you pay; not sure why anyone would expect “on the internet” to change that.

Because I pay specifically for only the crossword part. I bought a book of 50 (of NYT puzzles) for the same price, and it came with no ads. Much better deal, if you ask me.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#52

Post by awj »

benp84 wrote: post #48
chatmasta wrote: post #17

> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action. That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sendin…

Try a Cracked.com article. I left one open for 10 minutes and had 50,000 requests and 80MB transfered.

Holy crap, you weren't kidding. Loaded their main page, 12MB transferred in the first minute before I noped out of there.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#53

Post by outworlder »

marksomnian wrote: post #2

Doesn't this lead to vendor lock-in? All these Google proprietary services seem like they would be a big issue if they decide for whatever reason to migrate away from GCP.

Which ones? There are ways to use way, way more Google services in your architecture. They have a bunch of industry standard stuff there, presumably that's how they were even able to migrate from AWS in the first place.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#54

Post by panopticon »

kuschku wrote: post #43
jedmeyers wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, they were required to keep that API up for a specified amount of time after the acquisition and they have kept it longer than that.

And that’s an excuse how? Many of their cloud APIs are also acquisitions. The entire Firebase product line, and the Fabric.io product line are acquisitions. Should we expect those to also disappear suddenly?

I think the difference is that the QPX was the byproduct of an acquisition (ITA Software) while Firebase and Fabric.io were the desired targets in those respective acquisitions.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#56

Post by degenerate »

amelius wrote: post #55

What does zero downtime mean? No interruptions of services? Or just that people could still log in all the time?

Pretty sure they mean people could login again after the switch.

I can't imagine what the purpose would be of capturing session data for each logged in user and transferring that over... I wouldn't even expect that of a fortune 500 company moving platforms.

If that is what they did, it warrants a post on its own.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#57

Post by amelius »

degenerate wrote: post #56
amelius wrote: post #55

What does zero downtime mean? No interruptions of services? Or just that people could still log in all the time?

Pretty sure they mean people could login again after the switch. I can't imagine what the purpose would be of capturing session data for each logged in user and transferring that over... I wouldn't even expect that of a fortune 500 company moving platforms. If that is what they did, it warrants a post on its own.

Imho, in that case "zero downtime" is the wrong term.

Because it implies that nobody's running session went "down".

That's much harder because otherwise you'd just start a new service parallel to the other one, and flip a switch that directs all new logins to the new service.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#58

Post by paulddraper »

awj wrote: post #52
benp84 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a Cracked.com article. I left one open for 10 minutes and had 50,000 requests and 80MB transfered.

Holy crap, you weren't kidding. Loaded their main page, 12MB transferred in the first minute before I noped out of there.

How times change.

That would've taken half a hour on a dial-up connection.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#59

Post by everyplace »

degenerate wrote: post #56
amelius wrote: post #55

What does zero downtime mean? No interruptions of services? Or just that people could still log in all the time?

Pretty sure they mean people could login again after the switch. I can't imagine what the purpose would be of capturing session data for each logged in user and transferring that over... I wouldn't even expect that of a fortune 500 company moving platforms. If that is what they did, it warrants a post on its own.

Imagine if you were half way through the puzzle when the cutover happened, and then you lost your entire puzzle state and the board was reset. For the die-hard crossword players, this would be devastating.

Re: Moving the NYT Games Platform to Google Cloud With Zero Downtime

#60

Post by eitally »

jedberg wrote: post #22
Top19 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s actually double lock-in, so 2x worse. You used to have to just be afraid of lock-in, which I don’t think is as big an issue as it sometimes seems. But with Google, you’re not only locked in but might be LOCKED OUT when they kill your product.

Usually when a large company relies heavily on a cloud provider, they have an additional contract that specifies, among other things, advanced warning of any pending shutdown, often measured in years , to give them enough time to adjust and also to appease their shareholders and auditors.

And even without this, Google has a history of proactively notifying paying customers years in advance of termination of a commercial enterprise service. The Search Appliances are a perfect example -- EOL was announced a couple years ago but support has persisted for existing customers and only next spring will they finally be fully unsupported. Moreover, Google is actively offering migration plans & assistance to move GSA customers to the new Cloud Search service, or even to third party indexers like Elastic.

I get the gist of the OP's complaint, but like you said, that behavior pattern is just not tenable in the kind of operating environment Google Cloud finds itself in these days.

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud, but not on any of the aforementioned products.

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