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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#351

Post by jmathai »

Alupis wrote: post #317
jmathai wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or, more likely, in the beginning AWS is what their developers knew and were familiar with, and then as time went on it was easy and convenient to just spin up "one more instance". 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 confide…

What I'm saying is that I agree that it would be a serious undertaking to move off AWS today. But it's probably also going to provide marginal benefit. No one on the finance side of their business is probably losing sleep over it. If/once it makes sense to move off then the finance dept will tell the eng dept they need to reign in infrastructure cost...and eng will do that.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#352

Post by ericd »

jpeg_hero wrote: post #343
ericd wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all wealth transfers, though, not really value creation. The only value creation by the baseball players is the entertainment provided (which is definitely not nothing).

How about getting a massage? “Wealth transfer”? Or “value creation”?

Value creation, they're fixing/entertaining the customer.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#354

Post by halbritt »

bradstewart wrote: post #302
halbritt wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of S3 I can't think of any services that AWS offers that are worth a damn.

Route53, RDS, DynamoDB, SNS. To name a few.

Route53 is okay. Has an API that is incompatible with BIND. There are many other, better providers. Still, it's cheap, so who cares.

RDS doesn't really scale without costing a fortune. It buys you HA and backups. Great, but what if you need performance?

DynamoDB? It scales in terms of IOPS, but again, it's unaffordable.

SNS exists and isn't terrible, but why wouldn't I just run Kafka?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#355

Post by phamilton »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #219
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…

Everything seems reasonable except... ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances? I worked at one of the 100 biggest websites on the internet (a search engine), and we only had 3. Why/how would Lyft need 1000x that!?

The numbers weren't "all this together". I was just saying if 100% of spend was in category X, this is how much you'd get.

It highlighted pretty well, evidenced by your comment, that RDS was not likely a significant portion of their spend.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#356

Post by phamilton »

nodefortytwo wrote: post #152
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…

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

Absolutely. And for data processing I can guarantee they use spot prices.

Just trying to get a rough ballpark for infra at that level of spend.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#358

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #341
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything seems reasonable except... ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances? I worked at one of the 100 biggest websites on the internet (a search engine), and we only had 3. Why/how would Lyft need 1000x that!?

What'd you use those 3 for?

Basically, we had three types of data: 1) everything associated with the SERPs, 2) most things associated with payments, and 3) everything else.

Category three was relational, IIRC like ~2TB. We originally stored it all on a custom MySQL cluster, and we started running into pretty bad replication lag. Amazon came around with Arora and promised we'd never have any replication lag. We switched over. Still had replication lag.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#359

Post by bm1362 »

theossuary wrote: post #165
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…

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…

Having worked in the EC2 org, the people doing the customer service tickets were usually the oncall, when nothing was on fire, or the daytime SREs. You could get hit-or-miss depending on whom is oncall and picks up your ticket, some people were non-empathic and would reply to those tickets with one word answers or you'd get lucky with people that would dig deep.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#360

Post by bm1362 »

munchbunny wrote: post #215
privateSFacct wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually curious how AWS is able to scale support so well with what seems reasonable quality. I had an issue (my fault in end), got excellent support - and they didn't tell us to take a hike at end when it turned out not AWS fault. Conversely, with GCP 4 years ago now had some support issues - didn't come away impressed - I'm convinced even internally GCP isn't well doc'd or something.

I think it comes down to Amazon vs. Google's company cultures around customer support, which informs attention and resource budgeting. GCP isn't the only Google product where people hate its customer support, and AWS isn't the only Amazon product where people love its customer support.

I think Amazon is the only company where values actually created a culture.
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