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WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

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Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#61

Post by YetAnotherNick »

grardb wrote: post #30
harpratap wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very naively assuming it would actually reach 1B users if it was paid.

Technically, but GP is allocating over 95% of post-tax revenue to everything other than engineer salaries, which is probably extremely generous. WhatsApp had 200M users in February 2013[1], which was a year before they were acquired by Facebook. Perhaps they wouldn't have gotten to 1B users without Facebook, but I'm sure they still would've grown in the last ~8 years, and fewer users likely results in lower costs. My…

Even before the sale, most of the customers are non paying. They are offering the service for free in countries with largest userbase(India and Brazil I think). I really doubt it had reached 50 million paying at any point in time.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#62

Post by oblio »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #10
oblio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

With 50 employees their "please pay $1/year" model might have actually made enough revenue

Nobody I know paid it even back then. That's why they used it, because it was free.

It's like Microsoft Office these days. If your home license expires they keep threatening you they'll disable it. For years and years.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#63

Post by ddalex »

seanhandley wrote: post #24
a_humean wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about its original purpose, which was telecoms infrastructure?

Oh, absolutely. I framed it this way intentionally. Without a doubt the most successful Erlang apps are telecoms related.

Almost like Erlang was designed by a telecom company ....

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#64

Post by bjarneh »

mrweasel wrote: post #42
bjarneh wrote: post #9

This article does very little to explain how they did that. It basically states the type of tech they used (Erlang, FreeBSD and SoftLayer), and something about not trying to over engineer stuff. The title also makes it sound like 500 engineers would make it easier to scale up WhatsApp, which does not make too much sense either.

The technology stack isn't even that relevant. There have been a few different articles about WhatsApp and their 1B users with only 50 engineers. The key in previous articles was that WhatsApp hired really smart people. Having extremely talented engineers and a rather small scope is what allowed them to grow til 1B users, with a minimum staff. Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily rep…

> Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily replicated, and easier to accept, in my opinion.

I think you are correct. It also works as some sort of advertisement. Others feel like they made the right tech choices, if they choose the same tech as WhatsApp or Spotify. Completely forgetting that they probably need to be somewhat proficient in Erlang to get the benefits from the language etc.

I guess that "hire extremely good developers" is less sexy than just choose Rust/Erlang etc...

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#65

Post by trhoad »

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

A static React site, an Express backend, and a REST API is hardly exotic

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#66

Post by rjzzleep »

tdrdt wrote: post #31
johnfn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I want to build systems. Sure. And so do I. Specifically, I don't want to re build systems that have already been built for me which I can use as dependencies. And I don't want to spend all my time troubleshooting bugs, either - I'll take a well-maintained repository on GitHub with thousands of users bug-testing it for me over some janky thing some guy on another team threw together a few quarters ago be…

Having dependencies is not bad. But slapping a system together with a ton of dependencies you don't know about is bad. Simple is better in my opinion.

Simple isn't always better. Reusable patterns are. WhatsApp followed pretty standard erlang design patterns.

Rails and Django to some extent force a standard pattern, they're not really low dependency systems(although they are compared to most node projects). But that pattern to some extent makes sure that you can hand over the project to the next dev and he'll be able to make sense of it.

Somehow node.js has become what PHP used to be.

Whatever happened to interoperability? How are there hundreds of queuing system that use redis and rabbitmq under the hood, but you can only process things in python, javascript or ruby? The data structures are considered private.

So if you want to process your code in python you have to use the python message queue, if you want to process it in javascript you have to find a node mq. How does that make sense?

Want to do business intelligence on your javascript based system now? Gotta write javascript code. Welcome to debugging the same kind of memory leak and processing issues every other queuing system has had to go through.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#67

Post by mrweasel »

alanfranz wrote: post #13
oblio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

They could also easily have had different pricing based on location. Requiring EU and US users to pay €5 per year, while have perhaps just €0,25 in Asia, and free in Africa.

If you can't get someone to pay €5/$5 per year for a service they use every single day, then there's something really wrong in how we as users think about the service we use every day.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#68

Post by Closi »

bjarneh wrote: post #48
Closi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The title also makes it sound like 500 engineers would make it easier to scale up WhatsApp, which does not make too much sense either. It's something I think we have all seen a lot of times - that by the time a company is serving 1 billion users it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely, and because of that additional abstraction is required and the complexity/LOC skyrockets.

> it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely But makes little sense (as a developer/engineer myself) to think that growth in users, requires a ton of new developers/engineers. We are not tattoo artists, our job can scale indefinitely if set up properly, i.e. all you should need to scale further (to 1BN or 7BN) should be enough money to buy more hardware; which WhatsApp/Facebook clearly has.

I think that makes sense if the application doesn’t need to also grow much functionally during the expansion, but I believe the more common pattern is more users = more functionality to manage those users, support teams, global legal compliance and accommodate more niche phone systems = more engineers.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#69

Post by _Understated_ »

freeall wrote: post #54
tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

Do we really think Javascript is exotic? Hasn't it proved itself over many years now? That doesn't mean it can't have issues like anything else. And because of the massive scale of the language you'll see a lot of shit. It's a language and ecosystem like anything else - it's what you do with it that matters.

I wouldn't say JavaScript is exotic, it's more to do with what is being done with it.

Traditionally it was used to enhance HTML pages with some DOM manipulation but it's now being used for a million other things too.

So historically, if your JavaScript code broke your page would still render as it was just html but now there are all sorts of build processes and long chains that use JavaScript to create the html in the first place... I'd consider that the exotic bit.

Traditional JS running in the browser manipulating DOM elements is very much a foundational aspect of the web and won't deteriorate with age (with the exception of perhaps deprecated functions in the far-off future) but all these js libraries and tools and build processes with massive dependency-chains are what's being referred to.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#70

Post by KptMarchewa »

oblio wrote: post #5
kosolam wrote: post #3

WhatsApp is a spy app of Facebook nowadays

That was its fate anyway. Some things just can't really make money unless they do it in scummy ways (or we haven't found a viable alternative or a way to protect them). Public instant messengers, public forums, public file hosting, public image hosting.

1) They won't succeed unless they were international from the beginning.

2) A lot of people would be rightly suspicious to use govt systems for their own private data.

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