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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#181

Post by metildaa »

djakjxnanjak wrote: post #113
geezerjay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They have many teams making their own web services, so replacing AWS with in-house infra would require an AWS-like “private cloud” feature set, backed by geographically distributed datacenters. Network segmentation that is managed by configuration, user accounts with permissions to do specific things to specific services, etc. Engineers to build all this stuff are not cheap, and management to build and migrate to it…

Sounds like OpenStack...

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#182

Post by eropple »

halbritt wrote: post #179
eropple wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't, though. You have room for $300m of opex , coming in over time and allocated, as mentioned, around $8m a month. Less early on, more later. If you gave me $300m to spend, largely up-front, for significant capex purchases? Sure. We could do it. The team I would build would also probably still make mistakes that AWS et al have already largely learned how to avoid, but we could do it. But capex and opex are ver…

If you've built a heterogenous environment at the end of three years, then you've failed. The reason that AWS, Google, Azure, et.al do so well is that they don't just buy some servers. They do actual capacity maangement, and not a very good job of it I might add. They also manage the lifecycle of every component in the infrastructure such that the next iteration of that component is understood and interchangeable. Ne…

Fully agreed on all points. But it remains a really hard problem. And when you start to do it out at the scale of something like Lyft, you're gonna blow through your available parts of that $300m (because you can't spend it all up front, obviously) pretty quick.

The care and feeding of fleets of (physical) machines is really, really hard and not to be underestimated.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#183

Post by buboard »

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…

Why would they have so much data and so much computing. Would they be really dependent on that? Makes it scary to consider what could happens to their passengers if aws is down / hacked.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#184

Post by randomacct3847 »

opportune wrote: post #144
randomacct3847 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk. I’m very bearish on Lyft. It’s a pure bet on US ridesharing. They didn’t expand internationally (now those markets are saturated) and didn’t get into delivery (Uber Eats alone is worth 5-7b).

Do you think ridesharing is just going to die as a product or do you think it will become easily commoditized and all margins will essentially disappear? I think it's going to be around for at least another 10-15 years, and considering how much money uber and lyft had to burn to get to where they are now, I feel like it will be quite hard for competitors to capture relevant amounts of market share in the US

The business is clearly not sustainable..it’s not that there’s changes in demand but the company will literally run out of money in a very short amount of time unless something drastically changes with their business model

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#185

Post by throwawaymath »

halbritt wrote: post #172
doctorpangloss wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Having done a bunch of bare metal, I can tell you the calculus isn't really that hard. Bare metal will save you money. Operating bare metal at scale requires talent that doesn't exist, not necessarily at an engineering level, but at all levels. As an example, I worked at a place that had a large bare metal deployment, i.e. >1MW worth of compute. It was woefully inefficient and costly to operate. The product that they…

Feel free to ignore this, but would you shoot me an email? I'm working on a project that uses bare metal and would like to pick your brain.

EDIT: To whoever downvoted this, the commenter hasn't listed an email address, or I would have reached out directly. This is an honest attempt at communication that doesn't require someone to break anonymity.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#186

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

buboard wrote: post #183
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…

Why would they have so much data and so much computing. Would they be really dependent on that? Makes it scary to consider what could happens to their passengers if aws is down / hacked.

If AWS went down, we'd be worrying about a lot more than catching a Lyft ride.

EDIT: typo

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#187

Post by sealthedeal »

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…

that is absurd...

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#188

Post by qxi »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #174
geezerjay wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lyft's load varies wildly, with significantly higher traffic on Friday and Saturday nights than e.g. 4 AM on a Tuesday, plus spikes on certain evenings like Halloween and New Year's Eve. Having cloud hosting where we can dynamically grow and shrink based on load saves us a lot compared to having fixed infrastructure that is always provisioned for the NYE peak. Source: I work at Lyft.

Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) for greener pastures?

Worked for us at Twitch.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#189

Post by throwawaymath »

meowface wrote: post #176
cabaalis wrote: post #28

> In 2017 and 2018, certain of our named executive officers provided rides to riders using the Lyft platform in a similar manner as other drivers. We believe that these driving activities provide the named executive officers with substantial practical insight into how our platform serves drivers. I thought this was a pretty interesting point. I was about to call it dogfooding but not quite, since it's more of an expe…

Airbnb does this too. They give all of their employees an annual stipend to travel via Airbnb, so that they can regularly experience the app from the perspective of a guest. I think they also provide benefits for employees who host guests, for the same reasons. When you think about it, it seems so obvious that companies should do things like these, yet it still seems so rare. It's easy to fall out of touch with your…

Do you have any idea what the stipend typically is?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#190

Post by rajacombinator »

teej wrote: post #58
untog wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that always strikes me about the amount of money swilling around in tech. $90M is an absurdly huge amount of money. By absolutely any outside objective measure of work put in to payoff it is off the scale. To look at this as the founders having lost out is almost comical.

The founders (theoretically) created $20B in value and you think $90M is sufficient compensation? $90M is definitely enough to be more than comfortable the rest of your life. But a $5B payout would have meant they could start a VC firm, invest in the next several generations of startups, partially self-fund something ambitious like a Space-X, start funded non-profits, etc.

I’m as pro founder as it gets but they alone did not create that value. Tons of employees, and the investors who put up the money, helped along the way.
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