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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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #47
obulpathi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting from the article: "This accomplishment would not have been possible for our three-person team of engineers to achieve without the tools and abstractions provided by Google and App Engine." Talking about the use case from the article, they release the puzzle at 10 and need to have infra ready to serve up all the requests. On AWS, you need to pre warm load balancers, increase the quota of your Dynamo DB, scale…

Could you please post the URL for the resource and the number of hits it receives? I'm interested in high load websites and I have a hard time picturing how this could lead to petabytes.

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

bsaul wrote: post #12

Has anybody had successful experience deploying docker containers on appengine ? Last time i tried, i had such a bad experience in terms of deployment speed ( time to build the image, then upload it, then waiting for the stuff to deploy) that i reverted to managing my own gce instance. But maybe i had bad luck..

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by lftl »

brianwawok wrote: post #68
tarr11 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried to move a rails app to appengine. It uses the flexible environment (eg, docker). It took like 10 or 15 minutes to deploy, each time. Heroku does my deploy in about 5 mins. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/hZM... GCloud is cheaper though. Also, VMs spin up in GCloud amazingly fast. Like 5 seconds. Feels like somebody at Gcloud just needs to go and fix this. No reason this is so bad…

Deploy is 15 seconds on GKE. Wonder why app engine is so bad.

With GKE you don't necessarily update your load balancer rules with a deploy correct? The linked thread points the blame for app engine deploys on waiting for GCLB to update.

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

#74

Post by sigmaml »

obulpathi wrote: post #41
look_lookatme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need petabyte scale for the NYT Crossword?

Quoting from the article: "This accomplishment would not have been possible for our three-person team of engineers to achieve without the tools and abstractions provided by Google and App Engine." Talking about the use case from the article, they release the puzzle at 10 and need to have infra ready to serve up all the requests. On AWS, you need to pre warm load balancers, increase the quota of your Dynamo DB, scale…

I concur.

Currently, I am working on projects that use both Amazon and Google clouds.

In my experience, AWS requires more planning and administration to handle the full workflow: uploading data; organisation in S3; partitioning data sets; compute loads (EMR-bound vs. Redshift-bound vs. Spark (SQL) bound); establishing and monitoring quotas; cost attribution to different internal profit centres; etc.

GCP is - in a few small ways - less fussy to deal with.

Also, GCP console - itself not very great - is much easier to use and operate than AWS console.

Of course, YMMV!

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

#75

Post by obulpathi »

tomcam wrote: post #54
obulpathi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for your kind comment!

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

#76

Post by obulpathi »

vira28 wrote: post #69
obulpathi wrote: post #13

Two things keep coming up while comparing GCP and AWS: * This accomplishment would not have been possible for our three-person team of engineers with out Google Cloud (AWS is too low level, hard to work with and does not scale well). * We’ve also managed to cut our infrastructure costs in half during this time period (Per minute billing, seamless autoscaling, performance, sustained usage discounts, ... )

This thread here came at the right time. Today whole day I attended the DynamoDB training. Honestly, one thing that I understood is its cost based on reads and writes per second. Irrespective of the amount of read data per operation (whether its 1 bytes or 100 bytes), its always charged for 1KB. So, as a work around what they suggested is using a Kinesis, a Lambda and an another service to make the write operation as…

Yep, same problems with many other services:

* Kinesis Streams: Writes limited to 1K/sec and 1 MB / shard, reads limited to 2K/shard. Want a different read/write ratio? Nop, not possible. Proposed solution: use more shards. Does not scale automatically. There is another service called Kinesis Streams that does not offer read access to streaming data.

* EFS: Cold start problems. If you have small amount of data in EFS, reads and writes are throttled. Ran into into some serious issues due to write throttling.

* ECS: Two containers can not use same port on same node. Anti pattern to containers.

AWS services have lots of strings attached and minimums for usage and billing. Building such services (based on fixed quotas) is much easier than building services which are billed purely pay per use. This complexity + cost optimization pressures lead to complexity and require more human resources and time as well. AWS got good lead in Cloud space, but they need to improve their services without letting them rot.

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

#77

Post by ciguy »

As a DevOps consultant I've actually worked with clients migrating stacks to and from GCE/AWS (Yeah, both ways, not the same client).

What I've found in aggregate is that GCE is a bit easier to use at first as AWS has a LOT of features and terminology to learn. When it comes down to it though, many GCE services felt really immature, particularly their CloudSQL offering.

One client recently moved from GCE to AWS simply because their CloudSQL (Fully replicated with fail-over setup according to GCE recommendations) kept randomly dying for several minutes at a time. After a LOT of back and forth Google finally admitted that they had updated the replica and the master at the same time, so when it failed over the replica was also down.

There were other instances of unexplained downtime that were never adequately explained, but overall that experience was enough for me (And the client) to totally lose faith in the GCE teams competence. Even getting a serious investigation into intermittent downtime and an explanation took over a month. By that time our migration to AWS was in progress.

GCE never did explain why they would choose to apply updates to replica + master SQL at the same time and as far as I know they are still doing this. I asked if we could at least be notified of update events, was told that's not possible.

There were other issues as well that taken together just made GCE seem amateurish. I'm sure as they mature a bit things will get better, and it is cheaper which is why I wouldn't necessarily recommend against them for startups just getting going today. By the time you are really scaling it's like they'll have more of the kinks worked out.

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

#78

Post by ringaroundthetx »

ciguy wrote: post #77

As a DevOps consultant I've actually worked with clients migrating stacks to and from GCE/AWS (Yeah, both ways, not the same client). What I've found in aggregate is that GCE is a bit easier to use at first as AWS has a LOT of features and terminology to learn. When it comes down to it though, many GCE services felt really immature, particularly their CloudSQL offering. One client recently moved from GCE to AWS simpl…

Yeah Azure is like that too.

Stuff is just really immature and you'll get blocked by lots of things that make no sense.

If you have to get vendor locked in your quest to not have to manage servers while learning unintuitively misnamed parts of a computer, choose Amazon.

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

#79

Post by karmakaze »

ciguy wrote: post #77

As a DevOps consultant I've actually worked with clients migrating stacks to and from GCE/AWS (Yeah, both ways, not the same client). What I've found in aggregate is that GCE is a bit easier to use at first as AWS has a LOT of features and terminology to learn. When it comes down to it though, many GCE services felt really immature, particularly their CloudSQL offering. One client recently moved from GCE to AWS simpl…

Why CloudSQL instead of Cloud Spanner? If for existing SQL workloads I can understand but for new services I'm admiring Spanner over DynamoDB

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

#80

Post by vira28 »

ciguy wrote: post #77

As a DevOps consultant I've actually worked with clients migrating stacks to and from GCE/AWS (Yeah, both ways, not the same client). What I've found in aggregate is that GCE is a bit easier to use at first as AWS has a LOT of features and terminology to learn. When it comes down to it though, many GCE services felt really immature, particularly their CloudSQL offering. One client recently moved from GCE to AWS simpl…

As a Database Engineer working for one of the largest e-company in the market, I can clearly see your point. Definitely AWS RDS is very matured when compared to CloudSQL. I think CloudSQL only provides MySQL and Postgres (still in beta?). So GCE needs to build their Database Arsenal soon.

Next, your client faced issues with replication in GCE, thats not good to hear, but we do face issues in our AWS RDS MySQL and Aurora very frequently. RDS MySQL error logs not generated properly. Aurora has weird memory leaks, connection spikes, starting to behave sporadically when the memory crosses 80% and so on. We are working with AWS to figure out the issue still (credits to the AWS Support for trying to help us). So, to conclude whether you are in AWS or GCE this is the trade-off of "cloud". We need to live that, if you are moving to cloud !!

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