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Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

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Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#101

Post by hosh »

hatred wrote: post #90
Yodoshi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of google container engine (hosted kubernetes). https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/ Also them starting the project along with the knowledge they have internally scaling containers helps.

> Also them starting the project along with the knowledge they have internally scaling containers helps. FWIW, Most of this are advertising gimmicks though and Google has a pretty different internal infrastructure for orchestrating containers that has hardly much to do with K8s.

Google Kubernetes Engine still runs Kubernetes. I never looked at the Borg or Omega source code and had never been worked on a Google team. It is my understanding that there are some key insights developed from Borg and Omega that became part of the core concepts of Kubernetes that gives it an edge over other open-source orchestration systems. These include grouping containers into pods and using label selectors.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#102

Post by hosh »

whalesalad wrote: post #2

If I could do it all over again I would probably opt for Google. The Kubernetes support is wonderful and the overall user experience blows AWS out of the water.

I did do it all over again (at a different company) and tried Google. And it does blow AWS out of the water.

I don't regret hand-installing Kubernetes on AWS, if only because I know a lot more about how it works now. But I rather just spin it up with GKE.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#103

Post by cookiecaper »

paulddraper wrote: post #54
randartie wrote: post #50

Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth. This sounds like a really bad move on their part and they should have committed to building out their own infrastructure on 'bare metal' over the next 5 years instead. If you read their S-1, they list a dependence on Google cloud as one of their big risk factors. Yet they then go ahead and make this commitment instead of working towards elim…

Precisely. Google Cloud is a good idea when you don't know how much infrastructure you need. Of course, maybe they got some killer promotional deal with Google. Seems likely.

Having a basic scaffolding in place on a hosted cloud and making sure your devops scripts are up to snuff is a good idea when you don't know how much infrastructure you need, because then when the situation calls for it you can fire up a new node on-demand.

But unless you're still "in the garage" and a couple of DigitalOcean droplets are good enough, it's going to be much, much cheaper and usually much wiser to run your core infrastructure on your own colocated bare metal.

I've seen companies increase their server expenses by ~$1M/yr by moving everything to EC2, and they sit around congratulating themselves for it because now "they're in the cloud". There's no reason to do that!

Little humorous tangent: an AWS rep told someone I've worked with that Amazon really wanted to help them secure better pricing, because as new CFOs come from self-hosted companies and into AWS-dependent companies, the CFO's eyes bug out when they see the Amazon bills and EC2 becomes the first thing on the chopping block.

Script your stuff out in Ansible or something similar, run it on your own hardware, and use GCloud/EC2 as secondary data centers for failover/backup/support/emergency bursts/whatever. You can have the flexibility without paying through the nose.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#104

Post by 010a »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #83
010a wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. $33M would buy 412PB of egress alone. At 160M daily active users, that's roughly 2GB per user. In just bandwidth. That's high, and they've probably negotiated some deals to lower their bills, but also consider instances, storage (photos and videos), 10% of their bill is easily support... $33M a month is the right magnitude. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's actually way too low, an…

I was just offered 1 gigabit unmetered for $500/month in the Denver colo I run my servers in. I have to be sure, that Google gets their bandwidth for far, far less! Which means, 50 cents per Mbps/per month. Usually a 1Mbps means about 190GB of transfer over the course of a month, I think. So 1000 * 190GB = 0.190 PB per month. 412PB thus means ~ 2200 Gbit/s . Under my pricing, I get a whole lot less than $33M / month.…

No. In what world would Snapchat be paying the rates that you pay at your Denver colo center? Why is that even relevant? They pay what Google charges them, which is $0.08/GB egress. Probably less due to negotiated bulk discounts.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#105

Post by general_ai »

I wonder if they're still using Google AppEngine, or have moved to something lower level. GAE resolved a lot of its scalability and isolation issues thanks to Snapchat.

In a way, Snapchat was to GAE what Hotmail was to Windows NT back in the day — trial by fire.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#106

Post by eitally »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #56
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider 'toomuchtodo a voice of authority on operations based on much reading and discussion (particularly on moving to physical, which we've discussed before), have performed the very exercise being discussed four times in my own career ranging from a couple cabinets to a couple hundred million in capital, completely agree with the entire comment to which you are replying, and feel that your jab about "serious ex…

I really appreciate the kind words, and wish I had more than one upvote for your comment. I'm not here for profit or ego, just to share what I have learned and experienced for the benefit of others. "I am old, here are my mistakes, do not make them" sort of thing. Whether anyone believes it, there's a serious Bay Area echo chamber (which HN overlaps with); there is a whole tech world out there that isn't startup cult…

While I agree with your position in principle, I also come from a "legacy IT" world, the kind where systems are moved to public cloud because developers are several steps ahead of the DC admins, or because the CIO wants all net new dev to be on infrastructure he or she doesn't own. These are not "digital natives" (who have no excuse, imho). These are the thick, long tail or large businesses with aging infrastructure and a lack of willingness -- or ability -- to pay for top talent.

An additional point is that even the second tier PaaS/IaaS providers (like GE/Predix, for example) are trying to get out of the DC ownership business. There's no compelling reason for them to keep their own DCs when a) it's expensive to run & keep fresh, b) it's CapEx, and c) it costs them expensive heads to organize and manage everything.

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#107

Post by patrickg_zill »

010a wrote: post #104
patrickg_zill wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just offered 1 gigabit unmetered for $500/month in the Denver colo I run my servers in. I have to be sure, that Google gets their bandwidth for far, far less! Which means, 50 cents per Mbps/per month. Usually a 1Mbps means about 190GB of transfer over the course of a month, I think. So 1000 * 190GB = 0.190 PB per month. 412PB thus means ~ 2200 Gbit/s . Under my pricing, I get a whole lot less than $33M / month.…

No. In what world would Snapchat be paying the rates that you pay at your Denver colo center? Why is that even relevant? They pay what Google charges them, which is $0.08/GB egress. Probably less due to negotiated bulk discounts.

8 cents per GB is thus approximately $15 per Mbps (8 cents time 190)that Snap is paying, while Google is paying far less than 50 cents per Mbps.

Is my math off?

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#108

Post by [deleted] »

hueving wrote: post #85
toomuchtodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why opt for Google if you're going to use containers in Kubernetes? You then become cloud agnostic. You can even move to your own datacenter at some point (relatively) easily. Dropbox built out their own environment (and did it migrating 500PB out of S3) [1] [1a]. As did Twitter [2]. And Facebook [3]. And GitLab [4] (too soon?) As well as Mixpanel [5]. Even Twilio is multi-cloud (last time I checked it was split betw…

Ffs, reply to the comments replying to you, that's what the feature is there for. Don't preempt them by editing your comment so people see your response first.

[deleted]

Re: Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

#110

Post by eitally »

nikcub wrote: post #76

The timing is curious, they signed this dead and added $2B in fixed liabilities on their balance sheet days or weeks before the S1 filing. That they didn't wait until after the IPO suggests Snap may see the partnership as a positive. Could also have been pushed from Google's end as it is a nice way of bragging about a big get but without having to formally announce it, and being associated with a hot IPO that will ge…

Or they could have been running on GCP for a long while and just didn't announce it previously....

(they initially built their product on AppEngine)

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