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I'm confused by this high cost, sure you might need lots of compute, but storage tends to dominate over the long term. Isn't Snapchat supposed to delete data after 30s or whatever? Why this insanely high cost? Can somebody shed some light.
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.
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 between AWS and Rackspace; this was several years ago during an interview, so maybe its changed). Sure, start in Google, or AWS, but at some point you will either need to use multiple compute/storage providers (redundancy) or go to your own gear (redundancy and cost).
Example: "In 2014, Moz CEO Sarah Bird said that it was spending “$6.2 million at Amazon Web Services, and a mere $2.8 million on [its] own data centers.” Simply put, the cloud killed its margins." [6]
EDIT:
simonebrunozzi: Forgive me, but when you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in spend, "easy" is relative. It is much easier when you're not relying on underlying primitives that are difficult to reproduce on your own at another provider (witness how terrible Open Stack is; no one wants to do that if they don't have to).
Am I minimizing the effort involved for this discussion? For sure. But the money involved...it solves most problems you would have migrating between providers.
> It seems to me that you have no serious experience in the real world.
You are entitled to your opinion. I have seen the pain, and it is relative. Its easier when someone says, "Here is the budget, just fix the problem", and your vendor's (AWS/Google) margins are 20-40% (these are real margins pulled from earnings reports); that's a lot of money you can put back in your own (or your shareholders') pockets.
If you we're spending $2 billion dollars, and I told you I could save you $400 million by spending $100 million, wouldn't you take that deal? Even at $200 million, its a bargain!
For less than what Snap is spending on Google cloud infrastructure, SpaceX built a rocket that can take a payload to orbit and return the first stage successfully (SpaceX has taken on ~$1.2 billion in funding over the last 14 years). Moving out of a cloud provider is comparatively hard?
EDIT: Maybe this is a roundabout way to kick back to Google in order to get preferential treatment on the Ad network. It sure isn't a logical decision.
EDIT 2: @ashayh: I'm not saying go back to good ol' bare metal. For $2 billion, you could build your own cloud provider out as an internal operation. The amount that's being spent on Google Cloud is egregious, and worse yet, common shares have no voting rights to push back against poor decisions like this.
EDIT 3: @hueving: HN throttles my posting; editing this comment is my only way to respond. Sorry about that!
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...
[1a] http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/cloud-storage/how-dropb...
[2] https://blog.twitter.com/2016/overview-of-the-twitter-cloud-...
[3] https://code.facebook.com/hardware/ | http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/facebooks-data-centers-worldwi...
[4] https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/
[5] https://code.mixpanel.com/2011/10/27/why-we-moved-off-the-cl...
[6] http://www.thewhir.com/blog/moving-away-from-aws-cloud-dropb...
I'm confused by this high cost, sure you might need lots of compute, but storage tends to dominate over the long term. Isn't Snapchat supposed to delete data after 30s or whatever? Why this insanely high cost? Can somebody shed some light.
2. Like Whatsapp, server has to store the message until the receiver is online again (until they open the app).
3. Whatever systems they use for advertising, tracking, profiling, and analytics is probably a significant chunk of their backend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a crazy world we live in that's for sure.
There is surely a way to turn that into "accounting debt" that will cancel lots of taxes and save a lot of money one way or another.
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.
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…
https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/
Also them starting the project along with the knowledge they have internally scaling containers helps.
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.
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…
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…
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.