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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

#131

Post by oliwarner »

sudhirj wrote: post #115
oliwarner wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to come to the decision that in-housing isn't good value, is of course possible. But they do it for everything. And they've been exhaustive enough in their breakdown here that it's trivial to any experience developer that they're spaffing money away. They're not in an all-or-nothing situation. There are so many individual elements that they could improve efficiency on and they're just not. And I think cook…

Even if they are currently eating out, seven days a week, that was a decision to focus entirely on the product without any distractions. https://medium.com/unsplash/scaling-unsplash-with-a-small-te... It's absolutely nothing for them to be ashamed of. We can all disagree with the decision and say that we wouldn't do the same, but we shouldn't call it a bad of shameful decision.

I don't understand your stance in the context of HN. We're here to make money, celebrate people who can make money from the things they build, the services they provide... And most importantly to learn from it when it goes right and learn from the mistakes when it doesn't.

Unsplash is eating out seven days a week. But they don't have anything to show for it. They're burning through cash. The product is basic. There's no magic, nothing clever. It just is.

They're saying everything is great! I think it's a shambles; simultaneously mediocre at both making money and being an excellent example of engineering. Why is anybody here celebrating or defending this result?

I maintain what I said. Unsplash should be ashamed. They shouldn't trot out numbers like this label them a success. It's a record of successive failures.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#132

Post by Nextgrid »

HelloFellowDevs wrote: post #49
busymom0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of Soundcloud a few years ago when they were giving away API access for free for unlimited plays but then were almost close to bankrupt and pretty much shut down all API plays. I ended up shutting down my 3rd party app then but not sure what's their API limits now. Twitter recently made huge changes to their API limits too which impacted a lot of 3rd party apps. I hope Unsplash doesn't end up similar…

On the note of Twitter's restriction of API usage, Jack talked about it recently on the podcast Tales from the Crypt [0]. He doesn't give any specifics but attributes Twitters early struggle with uptime to unrestricted API usage [1]. [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-from-the-crypt/i... [1] https://overcast.fm/+KiHpBJHGo/15:30

Jack has proven himself a liar many times with his false promises regarding taking care of the abuse problem on his platform without success so I’d take anything he says with a pinch of salt.

Let’s also not forget that they have a vendetta against third-party clients (so they can push their own client with the bullshit algorithmic timeline and ads) so it wouldn’t surprise me that he says that just as an excuse. In reality their web access was just as unrestricted as their API so it should share some of the blame too.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#133

Post by tschellenbach »

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…

They are a VC backed high growth startup. Their focus should be on whatever they've decided is the success metric for their startup.

Many in-house projects end up costing 10x the cost of an external vendor. Of course, that's not something you read about often on HNews, its super common though.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#135

Post by Jommi »

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.

Not even close to true. Especially when comparing California with EU countries, even high tax rate ones. The difference between net salary and what company pays is actually very similar.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#136

Post by Jommi »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #120
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

> 600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble. Nope. You're forgetting the cost to the company is the burdened labor cost ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_burden ), not just wages. Payroll taxes, benefits, office space and equipment, etc. can add another 30-40% to the cost of wages.

Im not forgetting labor cost. I would actually say payroll tax, benefits and office space are even higher in California than any European country.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#137

Post by photonios »

scarface74 wrote: post #124
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'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 ea…

Don't imagine anything fancy here. This is roughly 100 lines of Python code that scales based on some tresholds. It took a day or two to develop, test and deploy.

However, we recently found a managed service to do this for us so we'll be switching to that as soon as we can.

If we'd have to spend more engineering resources on our infrastructure than the occasional simple tool, then we'd consider switching away from Heroku. The benefits still outweigh the potential engineering effort of not running on Heroku.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#138

Post by tschellenbach »

oliwarner wrote: post #105
sudhirj wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing a cost benefit analysis and deciding that using a service instead of hiring and paying humans is a perfectly rational decision. I’ve downvoted because I see a lot of vitriol like this and it’s exhausting to argue each time that these decisions are carefully considered and work well for the people making them. This is no different from saying people should be ashamed because they pay so much for food, then it’s…

Being able to come to the decision that in-housing isn't good value, is of course possible. But they do it for everything. And they've been exhaustive enough in their breakdown here that it's trivial to any experience developer that they're spaffing money away. They're not in an all-or-nothing situation. There are so many individual elements that they could improve efficiency on and they're just not. And I think cook…

Actually they stopped using Keen since it didn't work out well for them. They do build some stuff in-house, just prefer not to.
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