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Cost of serving billions of images per month

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Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#61

Post by Jommi »

marcinzm wrote: post #10
no1youknowz wrote: post #2

I 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…

600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble. You could get just as talented of a team from a Nordic Country for example and only pay 120kish

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#62

Post by novok »

bdibs wrote: post #3

I’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.

Seeing how heroku is a relatively minor item cost wise, they should probably focus on the bigger cost items first before thinking about getting away from heroku

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#63

Post by kiran-rao »

Ayesh wrote: post #58

Wow, these are some serious expenses! I run a service that does ~30 million requests a month, and I only spend $15 on it. It's an apples to orange comparison, but looking at their costs breakdown, I'm sure a couple engineers with a couple weeks can dramatically reduce their costs. For me, the biggest cost savings were at browser caching. With `immutable` and far future cache expiration dates, webp images, etc, I coul…

If you're able to, could you share what service you run?

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#64

Post by adrianN »

marcinzm wrote: post #10
no1youknowz wrote: post #2

I 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…

600k a year gets you at least five good developers in Berlin.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#65

Post by philliphaydon »

scarface74 wrote: post #45
kitotik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it much easier to maintain terraform code that allows me to use multiple cloud providers than if I had to do the same without terraform. You seem to have some insight to share here though, could you expound? *edit typo

How would Terraform help you move between cloud providers when all of the provisioners are specific to the cloud platform. If you’re a small startup, the least of your business risks are one of the major cloud providers shutting down.

Unless you use cloud specific services I still don’t understand why it’s so hard to move between providers without k8/terraform.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#66

Post by manigandham »

philliphaydon wrote: post #65
scarface74 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would Terraform help you move between cloud providers when all of the provisioners are specific to the cloud platform. If you’re a small startup, the least of your business risks are one of the major cloud providers shutting down.

Unless you use cloud specific services I still don’t understand why it’s so hard to move between providers without k8/terraform.

If you just want compute/storage then its not, but the value in cloud providers is in using all the cloud services.

Otherwise there are far cheaper server providers than can get you monster machines and unmetered bandwidth.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#67

Post by philliphaydon »

scarface74 wrote: post #42
abhiyerra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if they could use S3 bucket with a lambda to resize. I’m sure their images are a long tail so certain images likely have way more traffic than others. At a previous company where we were also doing a lot of imgix traffic we did something like this but with a go service but now I’d just offload to s3 and use lambda to avoid Devops..

I’ve done exactly this. But not at any scale. But if they are specializing in this and with low margins, AWS is not the answer. The compute cost would be relatively cheap and possibly even the storage cost. I would think that the bandwidth costs would be expensive.

A friend of mine runs a site which uses aws s3 and lambda resizing, but cache is via BunnyCDN. His costs are low after moving from aws cloudfront, and he’s serving ~400m images a day. (This is run by a company of 2 staff)

Just because everything is in AWS doesn’t force you to use all of AWS services.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#70

Post by jeandejean »

Ayesh wrote: post #58

Wow, these are some serious expenses! I run a service that does ~30 million requests a month, and I only spend $15 on it. It's an apples to orange comparison, but looking at their costs breakdown, I'm sure a couple engineers with a couple weeks can dramatically reduce their costs. For me, the biggest cost savings were at browser caching. With `immutable` and far future cache expiration dates, webp images, etc, I coul…

That's very tempting to do so but not knowing the exact details of the processing involved, you probably make a mistake on how easy it would be to optimize their costs.

It could be true, but would mean engineering time not dedicated at features and likely more risk and more maintenance. It's often hard to admit but costs are not that easy to assess and trade of are tricky.

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