81–90 of 311 posts
So they hit $400m of revenue in 2016 and have committed to spend at least that much on infrastructure each year for the next 5 years? After all the costs for staffing and everything else they better I hope they achieve amazing growth if they ever intend to profit.
Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth. This sounds like a really bad move on their part and they should have committed to building out their own infrastructure on 'bare metal' over the next 5 years instead. If you read their S-1, they list a dependence on Google cloud as one of their big risk factors. Yet they then go ahead and make this commitment instead of working towards elim…
Precisely. Google Cloud is a good idea when you don't know how much infrastructure you need. Of course, maybe they got some killer promotional deal with Google. Seems likely.
For sure. How much is this free marketing that Google cloud service is getting worth? I'm pretty sure whatever discounted deal Google gave Snap is more than made up by this free marketing blitz they're getting.
This makes no sense. One cannot spend $33M a month on Google Cloud. (Remember that it's half the price of AWS, and given a contract of that magnitude it's possible that they negotiated yet another half off). The amount of hardware and services one would get for that bill is insane. Snapchat doesn't need that much computing power and storage.
I'm not so sure. $33M would buy 412PB of egress alone. At 160M daily active users, that's roughly 2GB per user. In just bandwidth. That's high, and they've probably negotiated some deals to lower their bills, but also consider instances, storage (photos and videos), 10% of their bill is easily support... $33M a month is the right magnitude. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's actually way too low, an…
Which means, 50 cents per Mbps/per month. Usually a 1Mbps means about 190GB of transfer over the course of a month, I think. So 1000 * 190GB = 0.190 PB per month.
412PB thus means ~ 2200 Gbit/s . Under my pricing, I get a whole lot less than $33M / month.
So, does your calculation involve storing that same 412PB?
Interesting that just having one startup like Snapchat start on their platform made all the other little startups that came and went worth it.
If I could do it all over again I would probably opt for Google. The Kubernetes support is wonderful and the overall user experience blows AWS out of the water.
Why opt for Google if you're going to use containers in Kubernetes? You then become cloud agnostic. You can even move to your own datacenter at some point (relatively) easily. Dropbox built out their own environment (and did it migrating 500PB out of S3) [1] [1a]. As did Twitter [2]. And Facebook [3]. And GitLab [4] (too soon?) As well as Mixpanel [5]. Even Twilio is multi-cloud (last time I checked it was split betw…
If I could do it all over again I would probably opt for Google. The Kubernetes support is wonderful and the overall user experience blows AWS out of the water.
Why opt for Google if you're going to use containers in Kubernetes? You then become cloud agnostic. You can even move to your own datacenter at some point (relatively) easily. Dropbox built out their own environment (and did it migrating 500PB out of S3) [1] [1a]. As did Twitter [2]. And Facebook [3]. And GitLab [4] (too soon?) As well as Mixpanel [5]. Even Twilio is multi-cloud (last time I checked it was split betw…
I don't understand this statement. I have built systems that work with openstack and then scale up to public cloud. The primitive is the same as EC2, which is a virtual machine. What did you have difficulty with?
Nice Snapchat files to IPO so they can pay Google bill. Wonder who wins in this long game...
Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth. This sounds like a really bad move on their part and they should have committed to building out their own infrastructure on 'bare metal' over the next 5 years instead. If you read their S-1, they list a dependence on Google cloud as one of their big risk factors. Yet they then go ahead and make this commitment instead of working towards elim…
> Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth. It's a hedge. If they don't grow as rapidly as expected then they're betting that someone else will buy the excess reserved capacity from them for close to market rates. So in the case that they only use 1.5 billion dollars worth of hosting, they're betting that they'll be out, say, $25M rather than $500M. On the other hand they want to ma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why opt for Google if you're going to use containers in Kubernetes? You then become cloud agnostic. You can even move to your own datacenter at some point (relatively) easily. Dropbox built out their own environment (and did it migrating 500PB out of S3) [1] [1a]. As did Twitter [2]. And Facebook [3]. And GitLab [4] (too soon?) As well as Mixpanel [5]. Even Twilio is multi-cloud (last time I checked it was split betw…
Because of google container engine (hosted kubernetes). https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/ Also them starting the project along with the knowledge they have internally scaling containers helps.
FWIW, Most of this are advertising gimmicks though and Google has a pretty different internal infrastructure for orchestrating containers that has hardly much to do with K8s.