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Excuse me for being so stubborn, but this article reads like a paid for piece by Google. There is not enough information about who Andrew Walker is, and last ti

by aclsid 9y ago

Excuse me for being so stubborn, but this article reads like a paid for piece by Google. There is not enough information about who Andrew Walker is, and last time I checked, you needed to have some real professional help to create those kind of infographics. Oh, and I have just checked, and I really hate when people do this without a disclaimer: "3wks has been a Google Cloud Services Partner since 2012, building digital solutions for enterprise customers and public sector organisations specialising in web and mobile solutions on GCP."

k_sh 9y ago
I thought you were exaggerating until I clicked through to the article. Every single infographic uses Google's color palette...
liveoneggs 9y ago
he's the guy who gets your product delivered by wednesday after meeting with you on monday. It's right there in the article! Also, all of his delivered "products" are idle most of the 24 hours in a day, so there's also that..
tanilama 9y ago
My suspicion as well, how do they get the color palette so on point. Did a google image search, seems like this blog post are the very first one to use those images, so they must have talked with Google's PR team, otherwise they must have an excessive budget to spend their designers' time to advocate other people's products. I doubt it is for free. EDIT: they even get AWS's color palette right: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*ypBcvVoRIWfirQTBqL63Wg.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*ypBcvVoRIWfirQTBq... The person on the left. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*YrtTkA-xV_eincZV6g21MA.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*YrtTkA-xV_eincZV6... See the machine on the right, it resembles the yellowish color for AWS.
King-Aaron 9y ago
Yeah, I stopped reading about 1/4 of the way down the page after feeling like I was reading an advertisement. But I did the exact same thing, and spent three times as long looking for credentials on the author as I did looking at the article.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
The article makes some good points though: That’s like getting a turkey to vote for Christmas right? In fact IT is the department least accustomed to being automated. "We’re the guys who automate everyone else aren’t we? What’s this — now our own jobs are at risk? Woah." But it’s happening regardless and IT will resist it like all the other departments did. It’s human nature. But the conclusion is... Unsettling, to say the least: Enter the CFO who, in my recent experience, is the voice of reason. Now, more than ever, I see CFOs taking the lead in arbitrating technology decisions. This is the correct approach. IT must relearn the vocabulary of business: money. Has a good CFO ever been a decisive factor in why a startup succeeds? I'm not saying they're not valuable, but if the CFO is making your technology decisions then it seems like you've already lost.
foxylad 9y ago
OK, it is in this this guy's interests to "sell" Appengine, but he's absolutely right. And I have no skin in the game except as a very satisfied user. Our startup happened to get in on Appengine early on, and we went with it for exactly the reasons he puts forward. At the end of the day we spend all our time building our apps, instead of being diverted every time the mail server crashes, or a package needs a security upgrade, or our OS needs updating, or a hard drive dies, or a routing table gets corrupted, or replication fails between databases, or the load balancer is doing something strange. When any of those things does happen, I know the best sysadmins on the planet are jumping to fix it. Having said that, there are a couple of provisos you need to bear in mind: 1. If you need to do anything outside the Appengine ecosystem (using unusual protocols or ports for instance), you're going to have to do it outside Appengine. 2. You have to write to Appengine's datastore. There are alternatives (MySQL for instance) but none of them give you automatic concurrency, scaling and redundancy. This is more painful, but it means if you ever hit the big time, you're covered. I always imagined what would happen if Oprah mentioned our service on her show. If we had built on AWS (or Azure, GCS or other IaaS), I'd be tearing my hair out provisioning load balancers, web servers and sharding databases. With Appengine, all I'd need to provision would be a crate of champagne. The article mentioned the Royal Wedding website. This was a great example of Appengine's strength, going from zero to thousands of hits a second and then back to zero. If you'd done it with AWS (or even worse, real hardware), imagine the difficulty of estimating the number of machines you'd need, and the cost of provisioning them. If you have a "bursty" service, Appengine just works and you pay for what you actually use. And that's the other thing - what you pay is minimal. The Appengine user group is full of people complaining that it is more expensive than $CHEAP_HOSTING_PROVIDER, but as soon as you factor in any sysadmin time - or lost app development time - you come out ahead. We run three services with up to 2 million users, and the monthly cost is in two digits.
ariwilson 9y ago
Sorry, why do you need professional help from Google to create infographics?
- aclsid 9y ago
  I did not say the help needed to come from Google, but that it had to be paid for, and not exactly with pocket change.

by aclsid 9y ago

k_sh 9y ago

I thought you were exaggerating until I clicked through to the article. Every single infographic uses Google's color palette...

liveoneggs 9y ago

he's the guy who gets your product delivered by wednesday after meeting with you on monday. It's right there in the article! Also, all of his delivered "products" are idle most of the 24 hours in a day, so there's also that..

tanilama 9y ago

My suspicion as well, how do they get the color palette so on point. Did a google image search, seems like this blog post are the very first one to use those images, so they must have talked with Google's PR team, otherwise they must have an excessive budget to spend their designers' time to advocate other people's products. I doubt it is for free. EDIT: they even get AWS's color palette right: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*ypBcvVoRIWfirQTBqL63Wg.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*ypBcvVoRIWfirQTBq... The person on the left. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*YrtTkA-xV_eincZV6g21MA.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*YrtTkA-xV_eincZV6... See the machine on the right, it resembles the yellowish color for AWS.

King-Aaron 9y ago

Yeah, I stopped reading about 1/4 of the way down the page after feeling like I was reading an advertisement. But I did the exact same thing, and spent three times as long looking for credentials on the author as I did looking at the article.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

The article makes some good points though: That’s like getting a turkey to vote for Christmas right? In fact IT is the department least accustomed to being automated. "We’re the guys who automate everyone else aren’t we? What’s this — now our own jobs are at risk? Woah." But it’s happening regardless and IT will resist it like all the other departments did. It’s human nature. But the conclusion is... Unsettling, to say the least: Enter the CFO who, in my recent experience, is the voice of reason. Now, more than ever, I see CFOs taking the lead in arbitrating technology decisions. This is the correct approach. IT must relearn the vocabulary of business: money. Has a good CFO ever been a decisive factor in why a startup succeeds? I'm not saying they're not valuable, but if the CFO is making your technology decisions then it seems like you've already lost.

foxylad 9y ago

OK, it is in this this guy's interests to "sell" Appengine, but he's absolutely right. And I have no skin in the game except as a very satisfied user. Our startup happened to get in on Appengine early on, and we went with it for exactly the reasons he puts forward. At the end of the day we spend all our time building our apps, instead of being diverted every time the mail server crashes, or a package needs a security upgrade, or our OS needs updating, or a hard drive dies, or a routing table gets corrupted, or replication fails between databases, or the load balancer is doing something strange. When any of those things does happen, I know the best sysadmins on the planet are jumping to fix it. Having said that, there are a couple of provisos you need to bear in mind: 1. If you need to do anything outside the Appengine ecosystem (using unusual protocols or ports for instance), you're going to have to do it outside Appengine. 2. You have to write to Appengine's datastore. There are alternatives (MySQL for instance) but none of them give you automatic concurrency, scaling and redundancy. This is more painful, but it means if you ever hit the big time, you're covered. I always imagined what would happen if Oprah mentioned our service on her show. If we had built on AWS (or Azure, GCS or other IaaS), I'd be tearing my hair out provisioning load balancers, web servers and sharding databases. With Appengine, all I'd need to provision would be a crate of champagne. The article mentioned the Royal Wedding website. This was a great example of Appengine's strength, going from zero to thousands of hits a second and then back to zero. If you'd done it with AWS (or even worse, real hardware), imagine the difficulty of estimating the number of machines you'd need, and the cost of provisioning them. If you have a "bursty" service, Appengine just works and you pay for what you actually use. And that's the other thing - what you pay is minimal. The Appengine user group is full of people complaining that it is more expensive than $CHEAP_HOSTING_PROVIDER, but as soon as you factor in any sysadmin time - or lost app development time - you come out ahead. We run three services with up to 2 million users, and the monthly cost is in two digits.

ariwilson 9y ago

Sorry, why do you need professional help from Google to create infographics?

aclsid 9y ago
I did not say the help needed to come from Google, but that it had to be paid for, and not exactly with pocket change.