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How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

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Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#121

Post by oxfordmale »

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…

I challenge any in-house team to achieve the same reliability as S3.

To be fair most businesses probably don't need it, but it is worth taking into account.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#122

Post by jgalt212 »

> Canva now has users across 190 countries, who design in over 100 languages thanks to some amazing localization work done by our Internationalisation team.

How may of those countries are profitable? My sense is Internationlization is a relatively fixed cost, but how does customer support in Burma, for example, not trump any realizable revenues there?

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#123

Post by jedberg »

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…

> At list price of 9 cents per GB it would cost Canva about USD$20 million to export their 230 petabytes. Let me know if my calculation is wrong.

If you're doing a one-time export you can use a Snowball, which would cost about $70K for 230PB, assuming you had somewhere to load it off to once you got the data so you could give the device back.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#124

Post by [deleted] »

martinald wrote: post #67
maccard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team uses AWS for _everything_. There's three reasons for this on our team (and I've researched it for our use cases. - Consistency. Instead of saying "Oh look in AWS for this app, Azure for this one, and hetzner for this app, except it's test env is in AWS", it all just lives in AWS. It massively simplifies docs, onboarding, and reduces the amount of one-person specialised knowledge. - Engineering Costs. Similar…

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…

[deleted]

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#125

Post by fh973 »

icedchai wrote: post #109
colechristensen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have a few petabytes in a single rack. 50-ish drives in a single 4U server is done.

What about single points of failure? Replication? High availability? Disaster recovery? Backup / snapshots/ versioning? This is one of the benefits of the cloud.

Use a distributed file system or object store with what you need, like Quobyte or Ceph.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#126

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> That’s rubbish. Cloud operations need the same or more headcount if technical specialists, they’re just doing different things.

It's a capex vs opex question. For financial quackery reasons, accountants and stock markets prefer having less people on the direct payroll, which is why everything not part of the "core business" is outsourced - even if it is more expensive in either short or long term.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#127

Post by rirze »

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.

Sounds like your experience is limited to badly managed CloudOps teams.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#128

Post by mschuster91 »

amluto wrote: post #82
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…

> And then you have to factor in things like the cost of downtime (on both sides of the equation, especially if you use us-east-1) This is an important factor to remember when evaluating could costs. If you want to survive a cloud outage, you need a multi-AZ or multi-region deployment, and that costs developer hours. And you need to deal with the potentially catastrophic cost of inter-AZ or inter-region traffic, whic…

> If you want to survive a cloud outage, you need a multi-AZ or multi-region deployment, and that costs developer hours.

RDS databases are one click to set up in multi-AZ, and if your stack is Kubernetes based or at least EC2 autoscale capable it isn't much more work to make it multi-AZ as well.

Multi-Region deployments however, these are indeed expensive and nasty to set up.

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#129

Post by shawabawa3 »

pc86 wrote: post #74
notyourwork wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id argue this isn’t true until your spend surpasses $100MM. Lower amounts don’t justify the extra headache of on-prem.

I know we're just arguing about amounts at this point but that's pushing $2M a week . It seems on on-prem would make financial sense long before that.

Depends on your requirements. If you need 11 nines durability S3 is probably still cheaper

Re: How Canva saves Amazon S3 costs

#130

Post by mschuster91 »

shadowtree wrote: post #111
betaby wrote: 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.

> Not a single electrician on payroll.

Directly, yes maybe. Many companies don't have in-house experts (and get shafted by vendors as a result, as they're lacking the competence required to assess the quality of work).

But indirectly, they all have. In Germany, at least, you're required to have electrical appliances inspected by a licensed professional (an electrician or otherwise qualified person) at least every two years - most companies opt for using dedicated external companies, but you can also train someone for that task. On top of that come all the electricians hired by the landlords - the ones dealing with complaints and remodels, or servicing lifts, escalators, HVAC, datacenters, ...

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