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-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.
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.
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-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.