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Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

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Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#281

Post by gallonofmilk »

gjolund wrote: post #167
gallonofmilk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just like beauty, utility in this case is in the eye of the beholder. countless millions of people are finding utility in sending self-destructing pictures of themselves to eachother and although it might not seem like a "real" problem, there is inherent complexity and technical challenge in providing a large-scale social service that said millions use daily. disclaimer: i don't use it.

I interviewed at snapchat while they were still on the Venice Boardwalk. It was staffed by people who were laughing at their idiot users and trying to sell me on how many girls they pickup because they work at snapchat. Those guys are all millionaires now. They don't give a shit about anything but money and extracting everything they can from their users before they fizzle out and die.

isn't that the American dream though?

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#282

Post by lotso »

gjolund wrote: post #219
spotman wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes though, the scale of these things is enough to make programming (and operations if your into that) completely exhilarating. Things that seem extremely trivial, like chat, or the ability to upload photos, become quite an engineering feet when your measuring the amount of photos uploaded at terabytes per hour or more.

Snapchat runs on Google infrastructure, and brags about having 0 devops employees. Scale these days is a solved problem, there is nothing they are doing scale wise that I can't do in a couple weeks using AWS. AWS Lambda functions make on demand filters and photo editing trivial. It is one of their demo functions.

>Scale these days is a solved problem, there is nothing they are doing scale wise that I can't do in a couple weeks using AWS.

Excuse me for being blunt, but this to me seems like a statement someone would make who has never worked at this scale.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#283

Post by vgt »

gjolund wrote: post #219
spotman wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes though, the scale of these things is enough to make programming (and operations if your into that) completely exhilarating. Things that seem extremely trivial, like chat, or the ability to upload photos, become quite an engineering feet when your measuring the amount of photos uploaded at terabytes per hour or more.

Snapchat runs on Google infrastructure, and brags about having 0 devops employees. Scale these days is a solved problem, there is nothing they are doing scale wise that I can't do in a couple weeks using AWS. AWS Lambda functions make on demand filters and photo editing trivial. It is one of their demo functions.

I think you vastly underestimate Snapchat's scale and vastly overestimate AWS out-of-the-box scaleability.

Someone like Snapchat periodically surprises GCP with millions of QPS, something AWS would deem akin to DDOS. With AWS, you'd need to carefully setup infrastructure that statically accepts such scale. You need to plan, test, deploy resources, measure, etc etc. Snapchat has to do absolutely 0 of that - they deploy code. This is a major difference between Google and AWS - with one you can setup scale, but you pay for it, and with the other you get scale as part of your service, out of the box.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#284

Post by gjolund »

the_watcher wrote: post #270
gjolund wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. All the data showed that Twitter wasn't monetizable, yet people still threw huge valuations at it. There is nothing wrong with building apps and platforms that don't have clear paths to monetization, I just don't see why any sane VC would ever invest in one.

Because good VCs make money on the ones that successfully monetize, not on consistent 10% ROI. That kind of return is great, but just be a PE firm if that's your goal.

If you have the money to play the odds like that then more power to you.

I just don't like the acknowledgement that most of their investments will fail.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#285

Post by gjolund »

gallonofmilk wrote: post #281
gjolund wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at snapchat while they were still on the Venice Boardwalk. It was staffed by people who were laughing at their idiot users and trying to sell me on how many girls they pickup because they work at snapchat. Those guys are all millionaires now. They don't give a shit about anything but money and extracting everything they can from their users before they fizzle out and die.

isn't that the American dream though?

Maybe. Which is also sad.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#286

Post by gallonofmilk »

vgt wrote: post #80

Shameless Google Cloud plug: Snapchat runs entirely on Google Cloud Platform, and have famously declared that they have 0 Ops people because everything they use is fully-managed and no-ops. This is one of the reasons they are able to deliver features at such a rapid pace - they aren't worried about scale or reliability the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure.

> the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure

Can you expand on this? How/why would anyone developing a potentially high-traffic app have to worry if they are e.g. leveraging AWS fully? How does that compare to google cloud?

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#287

Post by gjolund »

lotso wrote: post #282
gjolund wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat runs on Google infrastructure, and brags about having 0 devops employees. Scale these days is a solved problem, there is nothing they are doing scale wise that I can't do in a couple weeks using AWS. AWS Lambda functions make on demand filters and photo editing trivial. It is one of their demo functions.

>Scale these days is a solved problem, there is nothing they are doing scale wise that I can't do in a couple weeks using AWS. Excuse me for being blunt, but this to me seems like a statement someone would make who has never worked at this scale.

I have.

Both high burst scale after Super Bowl ads and long running massively multiplayer games.

I am not saying that building services that operate at a massive scale is easy, but there is a wealth of talent and tools out there to help you achieve it.

The fact that all of snapchats infrastructure is provided as a service makes my point for me.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#288

Post by gjolund »

vgt wrote: post #283
gjolund wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapchat runs on Google infrastructure, and brags about having 0 devops employees. Scale these days is a solved problem, there is nothing they are doing scale wise that I can't do in a couple weeks using AWS. AWS Lambda functions make on demand filters and photo editing trivial. It is one of their demo functions.

I think you vastly underestimate Snapchat's scale and vastly overestimate AWS out-of-the-box scaleability. Someone like Snapchat periodically surprises GCP with millions of QPS, something AWS would deem akin to DDOS. With AWS, you'd need to carefully setup infrastructure that statically accepts such scale. You need to plan, test, deploy resources, measure, etc etc. Snapchat has to do absolutely 0 of that - they deplo…

Great response.

Out of the box I agree with you, GCE is much more capable than AWS.

However in my experience AWS is just as capable and much more flexible once it has been setup. Also AWS Lambda functions give you the ability to "deploy code" and has proved to be massively scalable.

I feel that "carefully setup infrastructure that statically accepts such scale" is not an accurate way to describe top tier deployments on the AWS platform.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#289

Post by vgt »

gallonofmilk wrote: post #286
vgt wrote: post #80

Shameless Google Cloud plug: Snapchat runs entirely on Google Cloud Platform, and have famously declared that they have 0 Ops people because everything they use is fully-managed and no-ops. This is one of the reasons they are able to deliver features at such a rapid pace - they aren't worried about scale or reliability the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure.

> the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure Can you expand on this? How/why would anyone developing a potentially high-traffic app have to worry if they are e.g. leveraging AWS fully? How does that compare to google cloud?

Snapchat runs almost entirely on Google AppEngine. They deploy code and leverage APIs. Their millions of QPS and vast CPU, RAM, etc usage is managed fully by Google Cloud.

You can certainly replicate their scale on AWS/Azure.. or Google Compute Engine for that matter.. but you'd need to do a whole lot of non-trivial work around scalability, durability, etc etc. Snapchat runs light on this front, allowing them to focus on launching features rather than keeping the lights on. No one even remotely close to Snapchat in scale runs as lean as they do, and that luxury is afforded largely by Google AppEngine.

Re: Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round

#290

Post by vgt »

gjolund wrote: post #288
vgt wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you vastly underestimate Snapchat's scale and vastly overestimate AWS out-of-the-box scaleability. Someone like Snapchat periodically surprises GCP with millions of QPS, something AWS would deem akin to DDOS. With AWS, you'd need to carefully setup infrastructure that statically accepts such scale. You need to plan, test, deploy resources, measure, etc etc. Snapchat has to do absolutely 0 of that - they deplo…

Great response. Out of the box I agree with you, GCE is much more capable than AWS. However in my experience AWS is just as capable and much more flexible once it has been setup. Also AWS Lambda functions give you the ability to "deploy code" and has proved to be massively scalable. I feel that "carefully setup infrastructure that statically accepts such scale" is not an accurate way to describe top tier deployments…

Minor correction: Snapchat runs on GAE, not GCE. PaaS, not IaaS, so nearly EVERYTHING is taken care of.

Something like this is impossible on AWS without pre-warming, pre-setup, or maybe even calling someone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT6tQAIywFQ&feature=youtu.be

Here's another example: EMR versus Dataproc.

Dataproc has per minute billing + very fast startup times (sub 90s for decent-sized clusters). So with Dataproc, you can rethink how you run Hadoop. Rather than starting with a cluster, which you fill up with jobs, you can have "cluster setup" as part of the job path. This is possible because you don't pay a large penalty in startup, nor do you pay a large penalty in per-hour billing granularity. Oh and Google is much more inexpensive (http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/google-amazon-cloud-price-war/).

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