Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on how you look at it. $1.24B profit sounds pretty good to me.
Not a correct reading. They had negative nine figures of "profit".
> They had negative nine figures of (profit).
FTFY
Lyft Files S-1
171–180 of 405 posts
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. Running your own infrastructure at large scale is actually really hard and therefore surprisingly expensive in risk and talent cost. If you look at how big the internal infra teams are at companies that host their own infrastructure, they're often individually the size of growth stage companies. The problem is that provisioning, reliability, and security are by themselves really tough problems. If those issues…
> If those issues aren't in your company's core competencies, it's not necessarily efficient to invest in building out all of that. Maybe that's just the story cloud providers tell you. Until you try, do you really know if it's all that complicated? People have been running datacenters for a long time, and not all of them work for Amazon. But there may be also a beneficial side effect of having gearheads around, and…
Having done a bunch of bare metal, I can tell you the calculus isn't really that hard. Bare metal will save you money.
Operating bare metal at scale requires talent that doesn't exist, not necessarily at an engineering level, but at all levels.
As an example, I worked at a place that had a large bare metal deployment, i.e. >1MW worth of compute. It was woefully inefficient and costly to operate. The product that they offered required network QOS and compute with real time capabilities, neither of which was available from any cloud provider at the time.
One of our executives (formerly a leader in the DC ops org at AWS) left the company to be replaced by another executive by another well-known silicon valley org who then insisted we should migrate everything to the cloud.
I showed him the relatively easy math that efficiently utilized bare metal was way less costly and that the aforementioned QOS and RT requirements would be a deal breaker anyway. He failed to fully grok this and remained insistent. When I quite, he seemed surprised. After the fact, I discovered that they'd made a deal with IBM to move everything into their cloud. A year later it was an utter failure and they abandoned the project.
There are lots of folks in the valley with lots of experience on their resumes that suggests that they should be capable of understanding these kinds of things that simply don't. Lacking that understanding leads to poor decision-making, which leads to failure, which leads to risk-aversion, which leads to everyone believing that it must be cheaper in the cloud.
Or so goes the old adage, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe. Running your own infrastructure at large scale is actually really hard and therefore surprisingly expensive in risk and talent cost. If you look at how big the internal infra teams are at companies that host their own infrastructure, they're often individually the size of growth stage companies. The problem is that provisioning, reliability, and security are by themselves really tough problems. If those issues…
> If those issues aren't in your company's core competencies, it's not necessarily efficient to invest in building out all of that. Maybe that's just the story cloud providers tell you. Until you try, do you really know if it's all that complicated? People have been running datacenters for a long time, and not all of them work for Amazon. But there may be also a beneficial side effect of having gearheads around, and…
I've worked at 2 companies that decided to do their 'own cloud' vs just use stuff like AWS, and they were not devops tool companies.
It slowed down both them.
Remember that staff cost money too!
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
100M/year is ~8M/month. Some perspective on that, it could by you one of: ~400PB of data in S3. ~2600 bare metal "x1 type" ec2 instances running 24/7, 3 year upfront reservation. ~60M Write IOPS in dynamodb ~300M Read IOPS in dynamodb ~3500 16xl RDS aurora instances Again, each of those is spending the entire budget on a single service, but that seems like a nonsense level of spending. Maybe they really have that muc…
At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?
Lyft's load varies wildly, with significantly higher traffic on Friday and Saturday nights than e.g. 4 AM on a Tuesday, plus spikes on certain evenings like Halloween and New Year's Eve. Having cloud hosting where we can dynamically grow and shrink based on load saves us a lot compared to having fixed infrastructure that is always provisioned for the NYE peak.
Source: I work at Lyft.
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#175As a multimodal platform/TaaS, is Lyft going to enter the urban air mobility space? Uber is already looking into eVTOL and air mobility with their Uber Elevate team. I saw Blade just launched scheduled helicopter flights in the Bay Area. Use my invite code, SF-4DAN98, for early access. Going to try a flight next week to see if it reduces my commute time.
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#176> In 2017 and 2018, certain of our named executive officers provided rides to riders using the Lyft platform in a similar manner as other drivers. We believe that these driving activities provide the named executive officers with substantial practical insight into how our platform serves drivers. I thought this was a pretty interesting point. I was about to call it dogfooding but not quite, since it's more of an expe…
Airbnb does this too. They give all of their employees an annual stipend to travel via Airbnb, so that they can regularly experience the app from the perspective of a guest. I think they also provide benefits for employees who host guests, for the same reasons.
When you think about it, it seems so obvious that companies should do things like these, yet it still seems so rare. It's easy to fall out of touch with your users and product.
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?
if I have one job in this life, it's to hang out on hacker news and repeatedly post about how it's not cost effective to run your own infrastructure. 8MM/month doesn't even come CLOSE to needing your own infra. - person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure
So, convince me?
- person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure.
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a correct reading. They had negative nine figures of "profit".
I don't understand. How could they make more revenue than what they lost for the year, but have a negative profit? The loss doesn't subtract enough from the revenue to go less than 0.
Revenue is how much people have paid them. Since costs > revenue, their profit is negative. The loss already takes into account their revenue.
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
But let's say you have a 300m budget.
You don't, though. You have room for $300m of opex , coming in over time and allocated, as mentioned, around $8m a month. Less early on, more later. If you gave me $300m to spend, largely up-front, for significant capex purchases? Sure. We could do it. The team I would build would also probably still make mistakes that AWS et al have already largely learned how to avoid, but we could do it. But capex and opex are ver…
If you've built a heterogenous environment at the end of three years, then you've failed.
The reason that AWS, Google, Azure, et.al do so well is that they don't just buy some servers. They do actual capacity maangement, and not a very good job of it I might add. They also manage the lifecycle of every component in the infrastructure such that the next iteration of that component is understood and interchangeable.
Network architecture, for example, should suit the needs of the application, but should also be decoupled from the underlying hardware as that hardware is going to evolve.
Compute is fairly straightforward as well. At the data center level, one makes a bunch of 400W holes. What you fill those 400W holes with is relatively irrelevant.
Re: Lyft Files S-1
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber hosts its own infrastructure, so does Google, so does Facebook. All three of those companies have no problems remaining focused on their business models without turning into a "datacenter company." I strongly dislike the notion that on-prem hosting is somehow a bad thing, or too cumbersome, or otherwise totally solved by cloud providers. AWS specifically is hugely convenient in a number of ways, but it doesn't c…
The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services. Sure you can run your own DBs instead of using RDS, but what if you start using their proprietary rubbish, like Knesis or DynamoDB? You have to rewrite application to use something else that's open source and self-hostable. For new startups, I honestly recommend using DigitalOcean or Vultur. You don't get all the AWS compone…
Netflix and its (ongoing?) transition from AWS to its own systems might provide some guidance if they ever decide to do the same.