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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

#91

Post by quickthrower2 »

stickfigure wrote: post #84
quickthrower2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing I’m being grayed because I’m suggesting Heroku might go out of business? Ok let me explain. That is one scenario, it’s unlikely but there might be other similar scenarios that pose risk being tied in to one providers stack. DDOS, TOS issues, simply out growing them, Heroku themselves having TOS issues with their cloud. There are almost weekly posts on HN of “this major service is down” and “that major se…

Downvoter (of your previous comment) here. Your comment is not only bad, but outright dangerous. This is a company that is burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars on hosting and staff with no business model yet. The primary risk to this company is not their host going away; the primary risk to this company is that they won't figure out how to make money . Worry about optimizing your serving infrastructure af…

Cool thanks it’s nice to hear the story behind the downvote. I agree you’d need to be flying their plane so to speak to know the reasoning behind their business decision. I still forget there are businesses that burn through that much cash looking for product market fit etc. it’s not the European way so I often don’t correlate spending 100k/m on hosting with fighting to stay alive. Anyway I was sort of making a general point about lock in. It may not apply to this company.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#92

Post by oliwarner »

The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images —they're all pretty average for a small image host— but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering some quite simple problems.

Seriously, I know I'm not in their shoes but I know what they do, I know popular options in these areas and I know they are literally throwing cash away by not trying to in-house any of this.

The worst thing is they seem proud about their decisions; that their current situation has justified $100K/month expenses. I'm not the only person in here that thinks they could be delivering the same —even better— service on a fraction of their current budget, even after hiring. I think they should be ashamed.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#93

Post by photonios »

GordonS wrote: post #87
photonios wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a company that runs multiple major websites pulling in tens of millions of users a month. We run on Heroku. We made that decision when we didn't have a single user. Right now we're a team with 25 engineers. Every time we need to re-negotiate our contract with Heroku we ask ourselves whether we should move away from Heroku or not. So far, the answer has always been no. Complexity would go up and the time sp…

> We use Heroku Postgres for our database and we get point-in-time restore for free, without doing anything For the record, you get this with Azure too. Not sure about AWS and GCP, but I would have assumed the same.

It isn't an individual feature that makes us stay with Heroku. It's all of them in a single platform with a unified interface that is very easy to use that makes it very attractive.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#95

Post by manigandham »

ALittleLight wrote: post #60
vincent_s wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He said it’s too soon to know exactly what that [business] model will be, but it will involve blockchain technology and cryptocurrency" [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...

Is there a way I can short this company?

I think the way to do this for VC companies is to sell them expensive stuff until they go out of business. This post and many others like it seem to indicate it works well.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#96

Post by MobileVet »

oliwarner wrote: post #92

The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images —they're all pretty average for a small image host— but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering some quite simple problems. Seriously, I know I'm not in their shoes but I know what they do, I know popular options in these areas and I know they are literally…

I hear you, but everything is a trade off. You and I would optimize the expenses more diligently, but they have chosen to focus 110% on the product.

Could they do both, yes. Do they want to, no. The goal, imho, of a startup is doing what you love on your own terms. They clearly love the product and have optimized accordingly.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#97

Post by speedplane »

oliwarner wrote: post #92

The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images —they're all pretty average for a small image host— but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering some quite simple problems. Seriously, I know I'm not in their shoes but I know what they do, I know popular options in these areas and I know they are literally…

> The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images ... but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering ...

What I found interesting, is that just a sliver of the budget is spent on software rather than hardware. I don't think this is uncommon, few teams are willing to pay for software they can get for free or make themselves. It's a bit surprising (but explainable), that commodity hardware that everyone has access to dominates the budget.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#98

Post by so_tired »

manigandham wrote: post #14
marcinzm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

And some projects really are just simple. Scale makes no difference to their services, it's a basic OLTP + search with resizing image proxy. This doesn't have any SLAs nor is it critical software either. 24/7 oncall is completely unnecessary.

I just had a look at your b2b site

Do you actually run pay-per-action campaigns, or do you provide a dashboard for the customer data ?

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#99

Post by scarface74 »

sudhirj wrote: post #53
paulddraper wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah something doesn't add up. I'll believe Heroku is easier, but can it be that much easier? For people spending piles of cash on their webscale?

I do both at work, small sites on Heroku and big / compliance required ones on AWS, and the Heroku ones don’t need a devops team, while the AWS deployments do. Given the cost of building the devops teams and the time they spend, it is a big factor. Prefer to default to a Heroku unless there’s a clear cost benefit analysis that includes human and opportunity costs.

if it is a simple deployment that you could do with Heroku, it would be just as simple with Elastic Beanstalk. You just give it your zipped artifacts.

If later on you need to do something more complex you have all kinds of extension points.

If you want something cleaner and just to use a Github -> CodeBuild -> Code Commit/Lambda deployment and have something closer to traditional deployment pipeline, there are the CodeStar templates.

We are a small company without a Devops team. The leads all know how to setup a from scratch system on AWS.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#100

Post by sudhirj »

systemBuilder wrote: post #33

10(+) billion images served monthly for $100k = 1/1000th of a cent per image. This is not bad but I think Netflix is 2c a gigabyte; you are 10c (I'm assuming 100k per image).

Netflix sends their own cache machines to tens, if not hundreds, of ISPs and interchanges all over the world, each of which have multiple terabytes of storage and act as cache nodes. I don’t think Unsplash is going to do that.
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