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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#151

Post by rrdharan »

netik wrote: post #130
zjaffee wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's believed that it would be cheaper for Twitter to have used cloud services (Snapchat spends less then they do on data center operations). There are certainly examples for big companies that benefit from having their own infrastructure (i.e. Dropbox since they have relatively specialized hardware needs compared to what cloud providers set prices around), but the number of people you need to hire to build and maint…

Twitter initially ran everything in the cloud. I should know, I was employee 13. It was much cheaper to build our own server hardware and move to our own server and network agreements. Peering and transit is cheaper at scale, as is commodity hardware.

Those numbers have changed since you left. And they could change again. It's all dynamic: these comparisons and the economically and strategically "correct" choices change over time depending on talent availability, demand, speed of scaling requirements and so on.

See https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc....

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#152

Post by nodefortytwo »

phamilton wrote: post #61
us0r wrote: post #12

>In January 2019, we entered into an addendum to our commercial agreement with AWS, pursuant to which we committed to spend an aggregate of at least $300 million between January 2019 and December 2021 on AWS services. If we fail to meet the minimum purchase commitment during any year, we may be required to pay the difference, which could adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations. Not as bad a…

100M/year is ~8M/month. Some perspective on that, it could by you one of: ~400PB of data in S3. ~2600 bare metal "x1 type" ec2 instances running 24/7, 3 year upfront reservation. ~60M Write IOPS in dynamodb ~300M Read IOPS in dynamodb ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances Again, each of those is spending the entire budget on a single service, but that seems like a nonsense level of spending. Maybe they really have that muc…

You are also calculating based on list price, with Enterprise discount, certain services can be quite a lot cheaper with spend that high.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#153

Post by [deleted] »

jandrese wrote: post #99
morningmoon wrote: post #46

"We have incurred net losses each year since our inception and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future. We incurred net losses of $682.8 million, $688.3 million and $911.3 million in 2016, 2017 and 2018, respectively."

It's pretty impressive that they've managed to lose that much money despite the fact that they are just running a website and an app. Yeah, that's oversimplifying it, but it's not like they own factories or storefronts or need to buy access to expensive services or something. The vast majority of their "employees" are independent contractors with no healthcare or retirement benefits who get paid by the ride (so Lyft…

[deleted]

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#154

Post by fierro »

geezerjay wrote: post #72
phamilton wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100M/year is ~8M/month. Some perspective on that, it could by you one of: ~400PB of data in S3. ~2600 bare metal "x1 type" ec2 instances running 24/7, 3 year upfront reservation. ~60M Write IOPS in dynamodb ~300M Read IOPS in dynamodb ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances Again, each of those is spending the entire budget on a single service, but that seems like a nonsense level of spending. Maybe they really have that muc…

At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?

if I have one job in this life, it's to hang out on hacker news and repeatedly post about how it's not cost effective to run your own infrastructure. 8MM/month doesn't even come CLOSE to needing your own infra.

- person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#155

Post by stepanhruda »

jonknee wrote: post #51
randomacct3847 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well apparently you can play baseball and make $330m. Yes, it’s a lot, but to build a $30b company and make 90m pre-tax (maybe 50m post in CA) is something... The obvious comparison is Travis Kalanick, who is definitely a billionaire and retained much more of Uber.

On the other hand, the baseball player will create much more than that in value while Lyft has lost billions of dollars. If someone here is underpaid it's not the Lyft founders.

What value is exactly a baseball player creating? Lyft has provided WAY more value to society over its lifetime.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#156

Post by ihuman »

piker wrote: post #73
ihuman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how you look at it. $1.24B profit sounds pretty good to me.

Not a correct reading. They had negative nine figures of "profit".

I don't understand. How could they make more revenue than what they lost for the year, but have a negative profit? The loss doesn't subtract enough from the revenue to go less than 0.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#157

Post by doctorpangloss »

munchbunny wrote: post #112
geezerjay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?

Maybe. Running your own infrastructure at large scale is actually really hard and therefore surprisingly expensive in risk and talent cost. If you look at how big the internal infra teams are at companies that host their own infrastructure, they're often individually the size of growth stage companies. The problem is that provisioning, reliability, and security are by themselves really tough problems. If those issues…

> If those issues aren't in your company's core competencies, it's not necessarily efficient to invest in building out all of that.

Maybe that's just the story cloud providers tell you.

Until you try, do you really know if it's all that complicated? People have been running datacenters for a long time, and not all of them work for Amazon.

But there may be also a beneficial side effect of having gearheads around, and maybe that's the real cost to going cloud.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#160

Post by munchbunny »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #157
munchbunny wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Running your own infrastructure at large scale is actually really hard and therefore surprisingly expensive in risk and talent cost. If you look at how big the internal infra teams are at companies that host their own infrastructure, they're often individually the size of growth stage companies. The problem is that provisioning, reliability, and security are by themselves really tough problems. If those issues…

> If those issues aren't in your company's core competencies, it's not necessarily efficient to invest in building out all of that. Maybe that's just the story cloud providers tell you. Until you try, do you really know if it's all that complicated? People have been running datacenters for a long time, and not all of them work for Amazon. But there may be also a beneficial side effect of having gearheads around, and…

I work for one of said teams, doing datacenter cyber-security. You could say "trying" is my day job.

Since we're internal and we manage a lot of capacity, we do often provision and roll our own equivalents of things that cloud providers will sell you, rather than just buying a cloud solution. It's often ambiguous whether it was a good use of time/money. If it weren't for the economies of scale that kick in at the sheer size of this operation, it would definitely not be worth it.

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