How we scaled Google Meet during Covid-19
cloud.google.com
cloud.google.com
* It's nearly instantaneous to use. You can just bookmark any prior meeting ID you created and reuse it indefinitely. You just click the meeting on your bookmark toolbar and join the meeting. Creating a new meeting is also nearly effortless.
* Works right in your web browser. It doesn't default to pushing you to use a native executable.
* IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom.
Google Meet or Hangouts from years ago was quite bad, but it has improved nicely.
Firm disagree.
Three days ago, I presented a video in a google meet stream for 50+ people. For three minutes the stream dropped frames , displayed visual artifacts and lagged behind my narration.
I was on gigabit internet and so were my colleagues.
I never had this problem with zoom, and I would never use google meets for a streaming setup again.
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/high-quality-vi...
Normal Google Meet Present is optimized for slides/docs which is a very different problem than streaming video.
When streaming the desktop, the browser doesn't get notified when some region on the screen changes. That means it has to retrieve a bitmap of the screen and 'diff' it with every frame, which is computationally heavy.
I am using zoom rarely and every time I am baffled by it's horrible UX. Why do people use it?
The most egregious example was when value of all of EMC’s business was worth less than the value of their VMWare ownership stake.
The Zoom story is really cool, and the business is simple. Are they actually worth $75B in a crowded, competitive market? We’ll see!
Whereas Zoom? They do one thing, and they do it well (enough). You don't download Zoom Hangouts one year and then switch to Zoom Duo then Zoom Allo and then migrate Zoom Meet. You just use Zoom and it works well enough.
I feel like Zoom has basically eaten Google's lunch here, not by actually being a better offering, but by simply being a straightforward proposition. Perhaps Google can learn some lessons for the future...
I tested on a new account and the default was on, which you might argue is bad, but when I tried to create my first calendar event there was a popup that told me that it was on and gave me the option to turn it off.
Plus when you create a event the option to include a Google Meet is right there and it's one click to remove.
Also, Google could/should recognize that a meeting invite with a competitor's room URL in it is somewhere it shouldn't inject its own. Especially since it opens up yet another avenue for an open and shut anticompetitive case against them.
You could argue that, yes. And I won't blame you. But if you ignore Google and Meet for a moment and consider Microsoft (or in an alternate universe - Apple); product wise, this is a good decision. Reduces friction from creating meetings and provides a better experience.
You can disable automated Meet meeting generation though.
Youtube bandwidth is there. Google meet is just a rounding error. Of course (most likely) there will be dedicated planning going forward, but these type of traffic ramping up is daily operation at Google.
At Google, application developers rarely pay much attention to scalability, that's how the TI org tries to achieve, and they are probably the best AFAIK.
Capacity planning done like that is mostly a waste of time...
I was saying that this sudden increase in the traffic should not cause major issues. Most likely several SREs have emergency meetings, and get quotas across places. Then it's done.
If you read my post above, you'll notice that I did not mention SREs. I was saying app developers do not care planning.
Of course, some app developers thought they were doing planning, as in some activity to estimate demands, etc.
That, in Google infrastructure engineering, is not considered capacity planning. The typical capacity planning is done by SRE with more procedures that certainly border the most curious developers.
i also recommend forcing mpv->ytdl to h264 for the same reason; fan keeps quiet while watching youtube.
I bookmarked the article that can be seen as an engineering approach to solve a problem like this.
Yeah that's precisely what I'm afraid of given their track record.
Some of my fellow employees asked for a company wide Zoom license at the beginning of WFH so out of curiosity I looked to see how much Zoom costs. Turns out it costs about the same as all of G Suite which honestly surprised me (in how expensive Zoom is).
That and I’m not installing a proprietary, possibly spyware ridden (excluding spying at the server) that installs weird daemons on my computer.
For family use, I’ve found FaceTime to have the best AV if everyone has a decent connection.
Just yesterday, we were asking people in our school WhatsApp Group to install Teams app. As for Google Meet, just update!!!
srsly?
Youtube has 2 billion users.
Gmail has 1.5 billion users.
Android/Play Services has 2.5 billion users (well Android has 2.5, Play Services probably has at least 1.5 billion users).
For Google a service with 100 million users is a drop in the bucket :-)
Also, the WebRTC stuff all browser based videoconferencing apps are built on supports peer to peer Comms in most cases, so worst case they could have moved all the users over to that in an overload situation.