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How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

canva.dev

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Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#111
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most businesses treat cloud like a utility, not tech. Don't want to generate their own power, deal with sewage ... and compute. Which in 99.9% of the cases is the right decision. Sorry for all you infra techies, but that's the way tech matures.

Infra techies are fine. Likewise 'grid is mature' and yet most of buildings with floor space over NN m2 have team of electricians, being them direct hire or contractors. Same for the 'cloud' - 90%+ of the world deployed 'compute' is not cloud.

Work for a 30bn market cap company, all our stuff is built on AWS. Offices all around the globe. Not a single electrician on payroll.

YMMV.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#112
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…

Datacenters are expensive to run, for many reasons. That is the appeal of the Cloud right there, before we even start talking about the people aspect.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#113

A lot of people in this thread should start consultancies that transition companies off the cloud. Apparently, it would be easy for them to save tens of millions, in turn making millions for the consultant.

Consultants who help to move to the cloud are not cheap too. And migration to AWS/Azure is still more common than out.

Pretty much the only go-backs that I have ever seen were when someone tried to forklift an onprem application that was never meant to run on a computer whose cpu cycles are metered. One of the most striking things to me in ops:dev relations was the way the conversation around performance and efficiency changed once we started paying for it by the cycle.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#114
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plot twist : Canva blogged this so someone could tell them some solution like this, without them having to hire the guy. :)

There's this law on the internet or SO or whatever where if you put the wrong answer in a post. Someone else in the comments will correct you with the correct answer. This in effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham'...

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#115
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're missing the point above. S3 is probably the easiest service to replace - there are loads of providers which use the _exact_ same protocol as S3. It's a drop in replacement. It literally uses AWS concepts, there is nothing else to learn apart from putting a different url into your application. Very few people should really be using S3 at any serious scale is my thoughts. The cost savings are enormous (plus…

People really have to be afraid of running VPS or whatever if they can't spun up a min.io instance to have their own S3 without dealing with Amazon's Bullshit

How big of a production deployment have you ran on min.io in terms of data transfer / month and total storage?

Because I've done small scale and can tell you I'd run S3 in the future.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#116

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…

“we store more than 230 Petabytes of data in Amazon S3, with our single largest S3 bucket coming in at a whopping 45 Petabytes”

How did they get so much data?! They say they only have 75 million stock photos. They must have tens of petabytes that are just dark.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#117
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infra techies are fine. Likewise 'grid is mature' and yet most of buildings with floor space over NN m2 have team of electricians, being them direct hire or contractors. Same for the 'cloud' - 90%+ of the world deployed 'compute' is not cloud.

Work for a 30bn market cap company, all our stuff is built on AWS. Offices all around the globe. Not a single electrician on payroll. YMMV.

You may call your company arrangement `electricityless` even! Like `serverless` - we don't use servers.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the durability of R2?

How would you measure that realistically? How durable is Backblaze or Azure? Cloudflare has been reliable on storage adjacent uses (caching) for a long time. Presumably you're more likely to be the cause of errors than R2 is by a few orders of magnitude.

well you don't measure it, you take it from their sla

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#120
post #103
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

140 racks is a quite a lot of tonnage of AC as well. And probably hot and cold rows to make it function.

Hot/cold was factored in not the AC or power needs. I don't know many places you could just casually ask for 100+ racks. Maybe our midwest datacenters are just smaller than what is on the coast.

The last place I worked that had that kind of capacity, I had access to the lobby of that building and that was about it. The server room I could access had space for maybe 15-20 racks and in fact had maybe 7, which is probably why it was always cold as fuck in there and I didn’t like being in there much.

Then there was a contract which had a server room twice the size and mostly contained an AS/3 and a couple racks of Intel hardware. You could probably get a ping pong table into that one. Giant rooms that are mostly white and too cold are a little freaky, and reminiscent of 2001.

There have been a number of stories of people not being able to utilize their floor space for more servers because they ran out of space on the roof for AC units. At one point I recall Google was working on power dissipation because they had hit the max electrical code, and so no one would agree to run more power into their buildings. More servers meant more compute per watt and per ton of chillers.

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