6 ms·

great case study!

by ageyfman 8y ago

great case study!

thelastidiot 8y ago
Case study my arse. Just reads like an ad pamphlet.
- yeukhon 8y ago
  If you are giving such cold comment, you might as well spell the word “ass”, which seems colder than the British’s arse.
- eitally 8y ago
  Disclosure: I work on GCP, opinions are my own. Case studies are a form of advertising -- so what? They're much more effective in qualifying a technology or service provider in a given area than a web page with a feature list. If you were looking for an engineering blog, you came to the wrong place, or had inappropriate expectations. The macro level point this blog post articulates is that GCP has now been successfully used, spanning multiple years, using varying architectures, by enough gaming companies (even just counting Niantic, Nintendo & Bandai-Namco, not to mention Epic, EA & Ubisoft) for it to be considered a tier 1 provider. Additionally, if you compare apples to apples, take a look at this recent Microsoft gaming case study ( https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/ubisoft-media-telco-azure https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/ubisoft-media-te... ) and tell me which you think paints the cloud provider in a more positive & compelling light. I'll close with this: if you want to use a FOSS stack for your stuff, fine, have at it. You can even rent servers via GCE and host there... or literally anywhere else. But there are a few critical differences between GCP and AWS or Azure. Setting aside the network quality & performance, which is objectively superior with Google, outside of GCE almost every other GCP product is offered as a managed service. Beyond that, there are several -- like Spanner -- that don't exist anywhere else. I fully appreciate a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, but there are plenty of situations where allying with a vendor that offers a superior product/service for your specific business need is absolutely the correct decision. I'll also note that Google is overall extremely good about open sourcing things -- like Kubernetes, Apache Beam & Tensorflow -- it creates and offers as managed services within GCP. You'll never hear me claim GCP is the best cloud for everything or everyone, but I take umbrage with potshots like this. All it does is cause irritation and muddy the waters for people trying to figure out what tech is right for them.
  - ec109685 8y ago
    That’s a fair point, but I don’t think it needed to be so heavy on the google cloud plugs to get the point across. Every other paragraph seemed to be checking a content marketing box, trying to slip in some nugget about the google cloud (e.g. the link to Google SRE’s when defining what a managed service is). Just sticking to the facts and adding more details on how the publisher deployed their stack (gce, gke, etc.?), why their app still prefers p2p connections even when the google cloud network is present, what a typical turn looks like in their app (is it stateless Scala servers mutating Cloud Spanner?), etc. More technical details and less plugs would be more effective in my opinion. Anyway, impressive work making such a great set of services available.
  - jfindley 8y ago
    To be fair, cockroachdb is very approximately spanner minus TrueTime. If you really know what you're doing you can get moderately close to the same stack, but of course you won't get the same network, etc.
- a012 8y ago
  I read it as a marketing for Google Spanner.
defenestration 8y ago
Would feel more honest and less like an ad, if they also mention the trade-offs and struggles.
- thelastidiot 8y ago
  Right on. You caught exactly what was missing from this non-objective article. Pure Kool-aid. No pitfalls.
- theDoug 8y ago
  A few trade-offs that required this setup are mentioned. Transparency is often difficult, and never satisfactory to all. As someone who works on the marketing team, I'm pleasantly surprised that even this much was allowed to be shared- it's pretty rare that we share customer architecture diagrams, let alone into a blog post.

great case study!

thelastidiot 8y ago

Case study my arse. Just reads like an ad pamphlet.

yeukhon 8y ago
If you are giving such cold comment, you might as well spell the word “ass”, which seems colder than the British’s arse.
eitally 8y ago
Disclosure: I work on GCP, opinions are my own. Case studies are a form of advertising -- so what? They're much more effective in qualifying a technology or service provider in a given area than a web page with a feature list. If you were looking for an engineering blog, you came to the wrong place, or had inappropriate expectations. The macro level point this blog post articulates is that GCP has now been successfully used, spanning multiple years, using varying architectures, by enough gaming companies (even just counting Niantic, Nintendo & Bandai-Namco, not to mention Epic, EA & Ubisoft) for it to be considered a tier 1 provider. Additionally, if you compare apples to apples, take a look at this recent Microsoft gaming case study ( https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/ubisoft-media-telco-azure https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/ubisoft-media-te... ) and tell me which you think paints the cloud provider in a more positive & compelling light. I'll close with this: if you want to use a FOSS stack for your stuff, fine, have at it. You can even rent servers via GCE and host there... or literally anywhere else. But there are a few critical differences between GCP and AWS or Azure. Setting aside the network quality & performance, which is objectively superior with Google, outside of GCE almost every other GCP product is offered as a managed service. Beyond that, there are several -- like Spanner -- that don't exist anywhere else. I fully appreciate a desire to avoid vendor lock-in, but there are plenty of situations where allying with a vendor that offers a superior product/service for your specific business need is absolutely the correct decision. I'll also note that Google is overall extremely good about open sourcing things -- like Kubernetes, Apache Beam & Tensorflow -- it creates and offers as managed services within GCP. You'll never hear me claim GCP is the best cloud for everything or everyone, but I take umbrage with potshots like this. All it does is cause irritation and muddy the waters for people trying to figure out what tech is right for them.
- ec109685 8y ago
  That’s a fair point, but I don’t think it needed to be so heavy on the google cloud plugs to get the point across. Every other paragraph seemed to be checking a content marketing box, trying to slip in some nugget about the google cloud (e.g. the link to Google SRE’s when defining what a managed service is). Just sticking to the facts and adding more details on how the publisher deployed their stack (gce, gke, etc.?), why their app still prefers p2p connections even when the google cloud network is present, what a typical turn looks like in their app (is it stateless Scala servers mutating Cloud Spanner?), etc. More technical details and less plugs would be more effective in my opinion. Anyway, impressive work making such a great set of services available.
- jfindley 8y ago
  To be fair, cockroachdb is very approximately spanner minus TrueTime. If you really know what you're doing you can get moderately close to the same stack, but of course you won't get the same network, etc.
a012 8y ago
I read it as a marketing for Google Spanner.

defenestration 8y ago

Would feel more honest and less like an ad, if they also mention the trade-offs and struggles.

thelastidiot 8y ago
Right on. You caught exactly what was missing from this non-objective article. Pure Kool-aid. No pitfalls.
theDoug 8y ago
A few trade-offs that required this setup are mentioned. Transparency is often difficult, and never satisfactory to all. As someone who works on the marketing team, I'm pleasantly surprised that even this much was allowed to be shared- it's pretty rare that we share customer architecture diagrams, let alone into a blog post.