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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

#121

Post by manigandham »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #76
sdoering wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Of the first 7 images 3 are adverts. Then you can scroll down a long way on mobile without any more ads.

That's pretty clever, actually. If you're just browsing, you're not going to hover over every image to see that it's sponsored, but a subtle product placement within that image might not be enough for your brain to recognize it as an ad bait. Not bad...

So that's acceptable? Not having any easily visible marks? I'm surprised to see this sentiment on HN which is so averse to ads of any kind.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#122

Post by sudhirj »

scarface74 wrote: post #107
sudhirj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve done both, and many projects start on Heroku then move to AWS once they hit scale. And every single time I keep cursing at how many hidden man-hours are spent on AWS maintenance. If you’ve tracked the time spent on AWS that wouldn’t be spent on Heroku, and plotted that against the cost of your leads’ and devops team’s time, and your opportunity costs, and you still feel it’s worth it, by all means go straight to…

I’m mostly a developer but I am also the person they trot out as the representative of our (nonexistent) infrastructure team to clients and lead most of the “cloud native” initiatives. We do a lot more with AWS’s managed services that would go beyond what Heroku could do. That being said, if we were just a simple database+website. How would AWS maintenance be any more than going through the VPC creation wizard one ti…

To get Heroku gives you, you'd need to set up EB, RDS (with performance insights), CloudWatch (for logs and metrics), Code Pipeline (don't remember if EB supports GitHub pushes). If you use the heroku run command, you'll need to set up a jump box with SSH keys properly configured inside your VPC with DB access.

All this literally takes one click with Heroku.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#123

Post by scarface74 »

sudhirj wrote: post #122
scarface74 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m mostly a developer but I am also the person they trot out as the representative of our (nonexistent) infrastructure team to clients and lead most of the “cloud native” initiatives. We do a lot more with AWS’s managed services that would go beyond what Heroku could do. That being said, if we were just a simple database+website. How would AWS maintenance be any more than going through the VPC creation wizard one ti…

To get Heroku gives you, you'd need to set up EB, RDS (with performance insights), CloudWatch (for logs and metrics), Code Pipeline (don't remember if EB supports GitHub pushes). If you use the heroku run command, you'll need to set up a jump box with SSH keys properly configured inside your VPC with DB access. All this literally takes one click with Heroku.

Even though it’s not considered best practice to tie your RDS with your EB stack, part of the wizard for EB is setting up a database and it will create your RDS cluster and the security groups for you. It also automatically sets up your CloudWatch logs. EB can use Github.

Again, I’m far from a dev ops expert, but I cringe at how much EB (and Heroku) does that’s magic and I would much rather use CodeStar with the templates that create a standard CodeBuild/Code Deploy/CodePipeline/CloudFormation set up, but I am comparing like for like.

I’ve never deployed anything to Azure but I have used VSTS (aka Azure Devops) with various combinations of hosted builds, on site builds with agents on the build servers and deployment servers and that’s even easier than AWS’s offerings. Even if the GUI setup would make a real Devops person cringe.

Yes I realize Heroku for all intents and purposes is just another managed service that sits on top of AWS and that you can even buy Heroku services from AWS Marketplace for consolidated billing (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=0112b5d...)

I’m also not arguing not to use Heroku just because it cost more. We always choose a managed service over having to manage things ourself even going as far as preferring Fargate even though regular EC2 based ECS would be cheaper.

But, I haven’t seen anything that Heroku gives you that couldn’t be duplicated with EB or if you need a more traditional approach a CodeStar generated template.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#124

Post by scarface74 »

photonios wrote: post #77
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 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've made a couple of small engineering investments to get features that Heroku doesn't offer. For example, we built a simple auto-scaler for dyno's that consume from RabbitMQ. This helps a bit to keep our costs down and respond to massive spikes quickly. We run our web servers, database, caching, data pipeline etc on Heroku. However, we are not _that_ dependent on Heroku. We use Docker for deployments, so we can easily reproduce what's happening and it reduces our vendor lock-in.

I missed this part. If you are okay with using managed services, why are you doing so much “undifferentiated heavy lifting”? Setting up autoscaling based on queues, managed RabbitMQ based messages (Amazon MQ), and without knowing what your data pipeline consists of, probably that too could all be done with managed services.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#125

Post by jacquesm »

spockz wrote: post #83
Jommi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Realistically the costs for the company are higher. At least in The Netherlands the total costs for the employer is between 2-3x because of social security, health insurance, pension, housing/office costs.

I've been an employer in NL for close to 30 years and the 2-3x fully loaded is not supported by any data that I'm aware of. 1.5 or so is more like it.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#126

Post by jacquesm »

adrianN wrote: post #64
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…

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

And 10-12 in Poznan or Warsaw.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#127

Post by kirillzubovsky »

manigandham wrote: post #121
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty clever, actually. If you're just browsing, you're not going to hover over every image to see that it's sponsored, but a subtle product placement within that image might not be enough for your brain to recognize it as an ad bait. Not bad...

So that's acceptable? Not having any easily visible marks? I'm surprised to see this sentiment on HN which is so averse to ads of any kind.

Acceptable? That's a frame of reference. Is it widely practiced on the internet, on every social channel? Oh, yeah, it's everywhere. They are not doing anything different, but they are executing the ads rather well.

I am curious how far they are going to grow before they turn the ad machine full throttle, and whether or not that will have a huge adverse effect.

We all kind of know that Instagram is a giant online store for everything, at least it has been for a few years now. Unsplash contributors seem to think that free will last forever. It'd be very interesting to see if they stay or leave.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#128

Post by [deleted] »

spockz wrote: post #83
Jommi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Realistically the costs for the company are higher. At least in The Netherlands the total costs for the employer is between 2-3x because of social security, health insurance, pension, housing/office costs.

[deleted]

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#129

Post by OrgNet »

Insanity wrote: post #50
OrgNet wrote: post #29

it would be nice if each category would line up in this graph: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*Bvw2zcdE146WaXB7i... ... kinda hard to read as-is

looking at that image fullscreen, the bars seem to be moving to me. Interesting effect

visualization fail though
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