[vgt]

I think if Spotify dressed down Google Cloud Platform competition, no matter the merit, there would be many more complaints (ex. see comments on this technical post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11029032).

Spotify did say that they really enjoy specific aspects of Google Cloud Platform, through their own engineering blog. Spotify engineers have also been independently vocal on Twitter.

Netflix has been very similarly vocal of their support of AWS.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on a better mindshare model, perhaps we can all learn to do things a bit better.

[shockzzz]

Right, I don't think they have to directly attack anyone. It's just a matter of tradeoffs - here are the things the Google Cloud gets us, here's a specific example that hones it in, and here's why that's critical to our business.

At the moment, the blog post just says, "Yay we moved to the cloud" and threw out some marketing buzzwords. It should be beyond a shadow of doubt that they got a lower price as a result. That's ok - now give us the details! On a product level, what made Google Cloud so compelling that you were willing to move your entire infrastructure to it? That question really wasn't answered, and is really the biggest thing, as a customer, I'd want.

Right now, I'd have to call Spotify as a reference in order to do to get that answer, which again allows them bring the price lower. Not necessarily democratize the information.

[nrh]

Spotifier here. Frankly, price is not the biggest factor in a decision like this. If we were going for the lowest cost cloud option, it probably wouldn't be either AWS or Google - there are other providers who are hungrier for business that would be willing to do deep cuts at our scale.

The way we think about this is that there are basically two classes of cloud services: commodities and differentiated services. Commodities are storage/network/compute, and the big players are going to compete on price and quality on these for the foreseeable future (as with most commodities).

The differentiated services stuff is a bit more interesting. Different players have different strengths and weaknesses here - AWS has way, way better capabilities when it comes to administration and access control and identity management, for example (which is actually pretty important when trying to do this in a large org). The places were Google is strong (data platform) are the places that are most important for us as a business.

Compelling: dataproc+gcs, bigquery, pubsub, dataflow Made it safe: high-enough quality, cheap enough.

What more would you like to know?

[shockzzz]

Hey nrh,

Nice! Did you have the data tooling built out before you went to Google Cloud? If you did, I could imagine the migration was pretty hard as well.

Also, all of those seem relatively possible with AWS Redshift, Kinesis, and Data Pipelines. I'm interested what Google Cloud had to offer, spec-wise.

[nrh]

I would categorize data tooling as a moving target - we have some, it's never enough, it probably won't ever be enough. It's a moving target (p.s. obligatory we're hiring!).

I think this Quora post does a good job of redshift vs. bigquery: https://www.quora.com/How-good-is-Googles-BigQuery-as-compar...

More generally speaking, (excuse me for being a little hand-wavey here) many of the AWS offerings feel like polished, managed versions of familiar tools. Redshift, for example, feels a bit like "hey we figured out how to abstract away a bunch of mysql instances to feel like a big processing cluster". That's not a bad thing, necessarily. The google stuff feels much more intentional - "we need to solve the problem of doing these sorts of queries at scale" vs. "we need to solve the problem of scaling mysql to solve these types of queries"

Maybe they're just better at abstraction, but whatever - that works for me!

[shockzzz]

So it sounds like BigQuery was the deciding factor in this case?

[nrh]

I'd say the data platform overall, bigquery is certainly great . So are some other bits.

[tschellenbach]

Are you dropping Cassandra?