Cost of serving billions of images per month
1–10 of 138 posts
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#2I like Unsplash. They and Pixabay are what I use for apps I have developed in the past.
But simply, this floors me. I looked at their costs and with some developer muscle, you could find savings such as:
- Move Fastly to Cloudflare. They don't expressly say what the cost is for that. But moving to CF would eliminate it.
- Move Heroku to Digital Ocean. It's not difficult to create a fully redundant solution.
- Move from Imgix to having Golang micro services which handle the resizing of images and use something like Belugacdn for the CDN. Beluga is $5k a month for a PB. (Or some other cheaper CDN if you don't like Beluga, but damn... imgix pricing)
I'm pretty sure that a savvy CTO could save at least $50k a month with a well designed project that does this over many months and achieves the same result and keeps the redundancy concerns for the small team.
I do realise however, why the team have done this. In the same position (with very few resources) I would probably have done the same. But damn, when a cost of a service gets up to a years salary ($120k) for a good developer. Time to seek alternatives.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#3I’m stunned that a business of this size would still be using Heroku.
Heroku’s sweet spot (to me at least) is for anyone with less than 3-4 servers. After that, it just becomes so expensive there’s no rationalization in the world that makes sense.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#4I like Unsplash. They and Pixabay are what I use for apps I have developed in the past. But simply, this floors me. I looked at their costs and with some developer muscle, you could find savings such as: - Move Fastly to Cloudflare. They don't expressly say what the cost is for that. But moving to CF would eliminate it. - Move Heroku to Digital Ocean. It's not difficult to create a fully redundant solution. - Move fr…
They say they spend $12,700/month on Fastly. I guess I don't know offhand the difference between Fastly and Imgix (which they also say is their CDN), but the levels of bandwidth they're talking about are not going to be free at Cloudflare.
We serve significantly more bandwidth and requests than their 2016 numbers at under $15k compared to their $17.5k, and we're not particularly lean on infra costs being a .Net shop with Win servers and MS SQL on Azure, and I can still bring our monthly a lot closer to $10k if I can find time for some projects.
But the reality is that even thousands of dollars per month saved can take a good while to ROI against the costs of development, or more so the opportunity costs.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#5I’m stunned that a business of this size would still be using Heroku. Heroku’s sweet spot (to me at least) is for anyone with less than 3-4 servers. After that, it just becomes so expensive there’s no rationalization in the world that makes sense.
Moreover what if Heroku goes out of business? Then they’re f’d. Hosting on k8s, using Terraform or whatever would give them a lot of automation and provider independence.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#6Now I'm interested to see what their business model is. It seems like they have a lot of money to throw at services instead of developing it themselves, so I'm interested in their ROI or opportunity cost decisions now.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#7Holy cloud. Well I guess the silver lining is they're leaving lots of room for cost improvements...
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#8I'm a little surprised as to how you guys afford to give such a quality service away for free. Really cool of you guys to share this data though. Wishing you guys continued success!
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#9What's the business model here?
We would never run with such expensive options for this functionality, especially if it was a free/donations powered service. This company raised $7.5M though: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#10I like Unsplash. They and Pixabay are what I use for apps I have developed in the past. But simply, this floors me. I looked at their costs and with some developer muscle, you could find savings such as: - Move Fastly to Cloudflare. They don't expressly say what the cost is for that. But moving to CF would eliminate it. - Move Heroku to Digital Ocean. It's not difficult to create a fully redundant solution. - Move fr…
$50k/month comes out to $600k/year which is the cost around 2-3 engineers counting overhead.
To manage infrastructure at that scale themselves they'd need someone who knows DevOps. To write services at that scale they'd need someone who knows backend engineering and micro services. Then they'd need to be able to have 24/7 on call rotations for when things break. And of course, like any rewrite it seems like a "couple month" project until you get into the details and it becomes a two year project. Soon you've got a full 6+ person team and are paying them a lot more than $600k/year.