311–320 of 405 posts
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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
So, convince me? - person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure.
As a former engineer at Lyft, looks like my RSUs would be worth ~2x my salary per year. Typical RSU grants are 25% of your salary per year, so those Lyft RSUs would have been a good return. But that's at a $18-25B valuation. I think $15B is more realistic given the losses and most recent round of funding. Lyft is in a tough industry. Kudos to Logan Green for getting this far. Good to see a UCSB alumn do well.
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> 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…
Yes, I've worked with a few of those datacenters. A few examples: - Recently had to purchase new servers, because of signed contracts the only servers we were allowed to purchase and put in the datacenter were four years old and technically EOF. - Firewall changes, AD changes, provisioning a VM, etc. are 48 hour turnaround. Purchasing new hardware requires 4-6 weeks. - Had an intermittent issue with their edge firewa…
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I promise you weren't actually doing your costing correctly to arrive at that conclusion. Engineers always badly mis-underestimate the costs of things and "rack & stack data center management" is way more costly than you are actually accounting for. Especially in terms of opportunity cost and, well, just wasted resources that aren't actually adding value to the company. There is way, way, way, way, way more to a runn…
Majority of businesses aren't running insane computations at huge scales... Most are running a few small internal-facing servers hosting some internally developed apps, and need very little resources. Just run ESXi, XenServer, Xen or something, and spin up a few VM's on a few thousand dollars of hardware, get a couple people to maintain it, and be done. Even at large scales, like Lyft, having your own internal team a…
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Maybe a few here would cause some concern. Also note that not all companies/governments using AWS just let everybody know that they are, so they aren't listed and you can only know when the service goes offline. > Adobe, Airbnb, Alcatel-Lucent, AOL, Acquia, AdRoll, AEG, Alert Logic, Autodesk, Bitdefender, BMW, British Gas, Canon, Capital One, Channel 4, Chef, Citrix, Coinbase, Comcast, Coursera, Docker, Dow Jones, Eu…
That's a useless list. To take the one example I happen to work for, yes NASA uses AWS, but not for anything terribly important. Without any evidence that one of the handful of groups on that list that have safety-critical infrastructure are running that infrastructure solely on AWS, I maintain my position that Lyft going offline would be a greater inconvenience to me.
I take it you don't use the bank listed. That's fine. Does your bank do transactions with them? Other banks? Other institutions/stores? Do you use NASDAQ? Do others? Since everything is so interconnected, it doesn't take much for one of those services to immediately or eventually affect a bunch of others. It might be relatively trivial if AWS goes down for a few hours, but what about a longer duration and the avalanche effect? Is that impossible?
You also changed the goalpost a bit from "worry me more than being unable to get a Lyft," which is the comment I responded to, to "safety-critical infrastructure." I can't give examples of that because no one in their right mind would list that anywhere.
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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) f…
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Majority of businesses aren't running insane computations at huge scales... Most are running a few small internal-facing servers hosting some internally developed apps, and need very little resources. Just run ESXi, XenServer, Xen or something, and spin up a few VM's on a few thousand dollars of hardware, get a couple people to maintain it, and be done. Even at large scales, like Lyft, having your own internal team a…
They're making $200 million / month based on their S-1 filing. I'm sure they've done the math and the effort to cost savings here simply isn't worth it to them.
Fast forward to today, and now it would be a serious undertaking with serious risks to move off AWS, not to mention the costs of building up the staff and assets to reimplement their requirements in parallel of AWS until reasonably confident they can flip the switch and still have an operating company afterward.
So, they're probably stuck - beholden to Amazon's whims and pricing mood of the day. They've bought convenience from Amazon in trade for massive technical debt, one which may be even more costly to get out of... Or impossible.
AWS isn't going to get any cheaper in the future..
Those free AWS credits Amazon gives students really pay dividends.
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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…
When starting out in a city, these companies often have a chicken & egg problem around getting to critical mass. To solve this, they must offer guaranteed minimums to drivers to maintain an available network even with low ridership. Without that, passengers are unlikely to find an available ride and will easily give up on the app. Those guaranteed minimums are expensive, but are true one-time costs. They are no longe…
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When starting out in a city, these companies often have a chicken & egg problem around getting to critical mass. To solve this, they must offer guaranteed minimums to drivers to maintain an available network even with low ridership. Without that, passengers are unlikely to find an available ride and will easily give up on the app. Those guaranteed minimums are expensive, but are true one-time costs. They are no longe…
Their sales and marketing is 25% of their expenses, and it’s not clear to me how much of that is driver incentives. Even if they cut all driver incentives and marketing they’re still in the hole.
Looks like the other driver incentives may not be included in revenue?
>This four percentage point improvement in Revenue as a Percentage of Bookings was driven by greater efficiency and effectiveness of driver incentives, which contributed approximately two percentage points, increased service fees and commissions, which contributed approximately one percentage point and revenue from the Select Express Drive Partner program, which contributed approximately one percentage point.
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That's not exactly fair, the first decade+ of that pre-dates the public cloud.
The idea to use hosting is much older. Many companies offered services like that even in the 90s with AWS it really scaled up and the quality for hosting then improved across the globe.