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Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

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Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#131

Post by late2part »

burntrelish1273 wrote: post #79
randartie wrote: post #50

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…

Snap needs to have consistent booked revenue in order justify this sort of outlay. This is akin to dot-com era companies signing long leases on buildings or small business owners buying lots of inventory. Plus, 2 gigadollars could easily buy 4-10 soup-to-nuts datacenters that have tangible (although less) resale value. Overexpansion is easy to do and super risky... these sort of moves increase expectations and scare…

Maybe. I agree with your sentiment, but a lot of investors say "cloud" - ooh good, I like Google, so Google Cloud must be good, buy Snap Stock!!!

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#132

Post by mtgx »

stevenj wrote: post #74
georgeott wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will Snap exist in 5 years?

Yes. If anyone wants to bet against them existing, I'll take the bet.

It's a shame that what started as one of the most private messaging apps around still doesn't use end-to-end encryption and has since been surpassed by many on that front, though.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#133

Post by [deleted] »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #125
ashayh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you want to run fully in the cloud, or homegrown DCs or a combination, you need talented people who bring the required savings about. When it comes to in house DCs, very few companies seem to have that top talent. For example, most companies are simply buying regular Dell/HP servers, Cisco switches/routers, slapping them in cabinets and calling it a day. They simply do not know how to take advantage of high d…

It doesn't take "top talent" to run the physical side of the DC. It takes processes and detail-oriented people who care. At this point, with datacenters having been in wide production for the last 20 years, there should be plenty of 7+ year veterans. (though yes, I have known in-house service providers that couldn't set up a new VM to save their life)

[deleted]

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#134

Post by late2part »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #22
whalesalad wrote: post #2

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…

"For less than what Snap is spending on Google cloud infrastructure, SpaceX built a rocket that can take a payload to orbit and return the first stage successfully (SpaceX has taken on ~$1.2 billion in funding over the last 14 years). Moving out of a cloud provider is comparatively hard?"

Brilliant.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#135

Post by late2part »

eitally wrote: post #106
toomuchtodo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate the kind words, and wish I had more than one upvote for your comment. I'm not here for profit or ego, just to share what I have learned and experienced for the benefit of others. "I am old, here are my mistakes, do not make them" sort of thing. Whether anyone believes it, there's a serious Bay Area echo chamber (which HN overlaps with); there is a whole tech world out there that isn't startup cult…

While I agree with your position in principle, I also come from a "legacy IT" world, the kind where systems are moved to public cloud because developers are several steps ahead of the DC admins, or because the CIO wants all net new dev to be on infrastructure he or she doesn't own. These are not "digital natives" (who have no excuse, imho). These are the thick, long tail or large businesses with aging infrastructure…

Snap shouldn't fit the model of legacy IT. To some degree, myspace did and that's part of why they failed.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#136

Post by plorntus »

beefsack wrote: post #97

For anyone else who was confused who Snap are, they do Snapchat (it wasn't immediately obvious to me.)

Hah yeah, to me too. Wasnt until half way through the comments I found out who Snap was. Could have at least used the former name in the article somewhere or their logo.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#137

Post by [deleted] »

xux wrote: post #99
randartie wrote: post #50

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…

I love Hacker News, where a random person can tell a company their $2 billion plan on infrastructure is "a really bad move" with authority

[deleted]

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#138

Post by chrissnell »

late2part wrote: post #126
xux wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Hacker News, where a random person can tell a company their $2 billion plan on infrastructure is "a really bad move" with authority

That random person is right. One can run a DC at scale of 50 racks at least 20% cheaper than GCP. That's $80M a year to hire 20 smart people at $2M a year and 200 reasonably smart people at $200k per year. Snap will vanish like their pictures.

I think you're very conservative on that estimate. We run an infrastructure on dedicated leased hardware (Rackspace). Our infrastructure costs are a fraction of what the equivalent public cloud footprint costs. With technologies like Kubernetes and CoreOS, our private cloud practically runs itself. We focus on apps and the developer pipeline, much like we would do if we were on GCP/GKE. We have approximately 60 dedicated servers. We're almost at the scale where it makes sense to leave leased baremetal for colocation. For a company like Snap, it's hard to believe that they couldn't save a few hundred million by building their own footprint in leased datacenter space.

The days of needing massive ops teams to run on owned and colocated hardware are long gone.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#139

Post by _m8fo »

What's the back-end equivalent of "free scaling?" For example, with the front-end, if you have a SPA or a website that's completely static, you can serve static files and JavaScript in a way that scales horizontally for free.

Is there a back-end designed (with compromises and all) in a way where scaling horizontally is free, at the expense of compute power or some other sacrifice? I want to say Erlang/Elixir, but I haven't played around with it enough to say for sure.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#140

Post by hamandcheese »

late2part wrote: post #126
xux wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Hacker News, where a random person can tell a company their $2 billion plan on infrastructure is "a really bad move" with authority

That random person is right. One can run a DC at scale of 50 racks at least 20% cheaper than GCP. That's $80M a year to hire 20 smart people at $2M a year and 200 reasonably smart people at $200k per year. Snap will vanish like their pictures.

That's assuming that:

- GCP will always have a margin that high

- Snapchat is paying the advertised rate

- They can find the requisite talent in a reasonable timeframe

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