241–250 of 311 posts
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That's unfair. From what I can tell all the canines are on the mobile app development team.
The android app team consist probably mostly of whales. (observation based on the fluidity of their app)
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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.
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Outsource the risk to someone who has an entire product devoted to that one area, and has many years of experience and is probably the largest provider on the planet for that service...
On the one hand - you're right. Google is good, I use GCP, they are competent and good to work with. On the other hand "someone who has an entire product devoted to that one area, and has many years of experience and is probably the largest provider on the planet for that service" also describes Enron at the time. Google's no Enron, but Size isn't the metric one should use.
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> 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…
I've never heard of anyone buying excess cloud capacity from a private party. Is this a thing? Is there a market for this? Sounds like a security nightmare.
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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.
> 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.
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A "random person"? How about a HN reader who is taking part in a discussion? They offered their view and why they believe that. Nowhere did they they claim "authority." Unlike your snide commentary they are actually contributing to the conversation.
Yes, the OP does claim authority, by stating his opinion as a plain fact, without knowing anything about it other than the publicly available information, and at the same time labeling a company that has raised 2.6 billion and has 100+ employees as complete idiots. Good discussion would have ensued after a statement like "I wonder why they don't build out their own infrastructure because at this scale it is usually c…
>"This sounds like a really bad move on their part and they ..."
That's hardly a "factual" statement.
>"Good discussion would have ensued after a statement like "I wonder why they don't build"
Do we really need to preface our comments with personal opinion disclaimers? When someone says "it sounds like", it seems pretty clear that they are admitting they don't know all the details, so how can what follows that phrase imply authority? That's absurd.
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…
But ensuring 5 years of guaranteed service at a fixed price is reducing their risk. It prevents Google from pulling the rug out from under them, or from the price going up and they have no option but to accept it. I imagine part of their plans are to move away from the dependency, but while it exists - this is exactly how you reduce your exposure to that risk.
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Outsource the risk to someone who has an entire product devoted to that one area, and has many years of experience and is probably the largest provider on the planet for that service...
On the one hand - you're right. Google is good, I use GCP, they are competent and good to work with. On the other hand "someone who has an entire product devoted to that one area, and has many years of experience and is probably the largest provider on the planet for that service" also describes Enron at the time. Google's no Enron, but Size isn't the metric one should use.
Sometimes it's just better to pay someone else to do a job.
I agree that too often "put it in the cloud" is abused, but there are areas where it really shines, and looking at their filings it looks to me like Snap has done their homework and that it's going to be a good fit for them.
They are signing on with one of the biggest, they are building out their own infrastructure over time, they are signing up with a secondary provider just in case, and they lay out their reasoning pretty well for why they want this to be handled by someone who has magnitudes more experience at it than they do (the big one being that they point out their demographic is VERY fickle, and any kind of performance issues, outages, or major problems could easily be the thing that switches someone to an alternate service forever. And they themselves don't quite have a grasp on expected growth so going somewhere that you can scale at a moments notice is a great benefit!)
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Bingo. They aren't paying advertised rates. Google will have margin but not as much as usual. Snap also has google by the balls here. What if snap comes out with a statement saying Gcp sucks and they're moving to aws?
Snap signed a contract - how are they going to leave that contract? Yes, maybe if there is significant breach by Google, but that's lawsuit level.
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…
Facebook reported $27 billion in revenue in 2016. Snap reported $400 million. You're talking two orders of magnitude lower than Facebook and almost three lower than Google. Snap simply does not have the resources to pour into custom data centers, even if they can raise $2 billion for infra over 5 years. Unless they have serious talent already, they're not going to match Google's massive 15 year investments by a long…
They have 1800+ employees as disclosed in their filing. So clearly people resources are not a problem for SNAP.
Do you believe its not possible to build 4 datacenter - 2 US, 1 EU and 1 APAC datacenter for 2 billion dollars? These are tangible assets that you can depreciate as well. The lifetime TCO of a center rack is $120K
Source: http://www.linuxlabs.com/PDF/Data%20Center%20Cost%20of%20Own...
Here is a DC build vs buy calculator. So can see independently those costs are about right:
https://www.expedient.com/data-center-build-vs-buy-calculato...