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How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

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Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#31

Post by re-thc »

andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Seems crazy to run such large infrastructure on a major cloud. Tens of millions wasted. Canva is likely trapped in S3 never to exit. The cost of getting their data out makes it impossible. S3…. the Hotel California of the cloud. You can check in any time you like but you can never leave. S3 is 9 cents per GB egress fees. Cloudflare R2 charges zero egress fees. At list price of 9 cents per GB it would cost Canva about…

> Cloudflare R2 charges zero egress fees.

The scarier part is Canva actually does use Cloudflare CDN, so it's not so much the cost of adding a new provider. It's just that the CDN team that manages the Cloudflare account is likely a different team :)

Too much isolation, silos and politics...

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#32

Post by skilled »

orangepanda wrote: post #29

Offtopic — is it some cardinal sin to include a link to the home page from a documentation? I dont know what canva does, if I stumble on a documentation page first, should I not be allowed to see the product's landing page at some point? This is so prevalent, it has to be a conscious choice.

What? There are multiple homepage links on this page, including the Logo, Home from navigation menu, as well as the first word in the article is a link out to Canva's homepage.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#33

Post by re-thc »

xarope wrote: post #28
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Seems crazy to run such large infrastructure on a major cloud. Tens of millions wasted. Canva is likely trapped in S3 never to exit. The cost of getting their data out makes it impossible. S3…. the Hotel California of the cloud. You can check in any time you like but you can never leave. S3 is 9 cents per GB egress fees. Cloudflare R2 charges zero egress fees. At list price of 9 cents per GB it would cost Canva about…

let me give some hypothetical; let's say Canva decides to cut cost by cutting the amount of storage users could have (e.g. quota, or lifetime): - if they had a sunk cost CAPEX of 100 PB of storage, all they could do is sell the storage servers for a fraction of the original cost (and folks like me snapping up pre-owned server equipment for said fraction of cost for our home labs). - on the other, since S3 is OPEX (no…

> So long as they are still earning money, why wouldn't they stick to this OPEX model?

The suggestion was to move to a different / cheaper provider. You can stick to OPEX.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#34

Post by weird-eye-issue »

andrewstuart wrote: post #26
iLoveOncall wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Canva's scale you'll spend hundreds of thousands a year, just hiring one of the engineers working on your home-grown solution. Multiple this by 50 or more just for the staff, before talking about hardware, cost of delivery speed, cost of bugs, etc.

Instead you can spend millions on paying top market dollar to AWS experts trying to work out your giant pile of spaghetti cloud infrastructure. Desperately trying to work out if they can delete this resource or that because who the hell knows which bit of critical code is using it. Or spending days trying to manage a chewing gum ball of IAM policies.

Wouldn't you just be swapping those problems with similar problems if you switched to on prem?

> Desperately trying to work out if they can delete this resource or that because who the hell knows which bit of critical code is using it.

How is this unique to the cloud?

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#36

Post by Sai_ »

andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Seems crazy to run such large infrastructure on a major cloud. Tens of millions wasted. Canva is likely trapped in S3 never to exit. The cost of getting their data out makes it impossible. S3…. the Hotel California of the cloud. You can check in any time you like but you can never leave. S3 is 9 cents per GB egress fees. Cloudflare R2 charges zero egress fees. At list price of 9 cents per GB it would cost Canva about…

They could optimize this by only egressing they most recently used petabytes of data for some value of “recently”.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#37

Post by manigandham »

andrewstuart wrote: post #20
onion2k wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always a cheaper way to do something, but it's important to remember that 'lower price' often doesn't mean 'lower cost'. In order to get the lower price you need to spend on whatever the alternative option isn't doing in order to give that price saving. For example, moving from AWS to onprem means you need to configure the infrastructure yourself; you save on AWS fees but you spend more on devops. And then yo…

>> moving from AWS to onprem means you need to configure the infrastructure yourself; you save on AWS fees but you spend more on devops This is the traditional “sell” for cloud computing and I don’t buy it at all. The clouds would have you believe it doesn't make sense to run your own systems because you need too much specialist expertise to run your own systems. The clouds sales pitch is the if you go cloud then you…

There are hundreds of factors for each company and application. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s rarely as simple as retail prices.

Even the same number of "technical specialists" doesn't mean it's the same if one option lets you move faster or remain more reliable.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#38

Post by littlestymaar »

ramraj07 wrote: post #27
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

Seems crazy to run such large infrastructure on a major cloud. Tens of millions wasted. Canva is likely trapped in S3 never to exit. The cost of getting their data out makes it impossible. S3…. the Hotel California of the cloud. You can check in any time you like but you can never leave. S3 is 9 cents per GB egress fees. Cloudflare R2 charges zero egress fees. At list price of 9 cents per GB it would cost Canva about…

Do you know how much it’ll cost to store 230 petabytes per month on premises at the same redundancy and availability level? I have done such calculations for academia at a smaller scale and unless you literally want it to last decades it’s definitely not worth it to do your own infra on this.

I keep seeing that argument, but you, like the others, don't provide the figures you claim you got from your calculation.

Also, it seams that it's 230PB in total, not per month, which fits in an apartment-sized server room (you want to have several of such places, but it's not that big).

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#39

Post by orangepanda »

skilled wrote: post #32
orangepanda wrote: post #29

Offtopic — is it some cardinal sin to include a link to the home page from a documentation? I dont know what canva does, if I stumble on a documentation page first, should I not be allowed to see the product's landing page at some point? This is so prevalent, it has to be a conscious choice.

What? There are multiple homepage links on this page, including the Logo, Home from navigation menu, as well as the first word in the article is a link out to Canva's homepage.

The logo and "home" do not lead to the product page - they lead to developer docs home page.

Did not think to try the first link though.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#40

Post by oefrha »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #21

Canva is a case where AWS made sense for the founders. The founders anyway made billions and who cares if you give a few hundreds millions to Jeff and have to hire expensive AWS consultants if you can avoid hiring a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server /s More seriously, I think the sweet spot is to buy 2x o 3x what you expect to need but do it off the cloud. At Canva's scale you'll spend hundred…

Apple uses AWS for most(?) of their cloud services. TikTok grew to the #1 spot entirely on a public cloud (Alibaba). I’m sure they sure have hired “a few ops people that actually know how to operate a server” instead.
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