201–210 of 311 posts
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I love Hacker News, where a random person can tell a company their $2 billion plan on infrastructure is "a really bad move" with authority
A "random person"? How about a HN reader who is taking part in a discussion? They offered their view and why they believe that. Nowhere did they they claim "authority." Unlike your snide commentary they are actually contributing to the conversation.
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To be fair, that company is run by these same 'random persons' that are commenting here.
That doesn't mean anything, though. "Some people who do X also do Y" does not imply that "people who do Y are qualified to comment on X." For example: Elon Musk is a Twitter user. I too am a Twitter user. So's Kylie Jenner, Donald Trump, and random spambots. Using the same service does not mean they're equally qualified to speak with authority about the same things.
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Whether you want to run fully in the cloud, or homegrown DCs or a combination, you need talented people who bring the required savings about. When it comes to in house DCs, very few companies seem to have that top talent. For example, most companies are simply buying regular Dell/HP servers, Cisco switches/routers, slapping them in cabinets and calling it a day. They simply do not know how to take advantage of high d…
It doesn't take "top talent" to run the physical side of the DC. It takes processes and detail-oriented people who care. At this point, with datacenters having been in wide production for the last 20 years, there should be plenty of 7+ year veterans. (though yes, I have known in-house service providers that couldn't set up a new VM to save their life)
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I love Hacker News, where a random person can tell a company their $2 billion plan on infrastructure is "a really bad move" with authority
On HN nobody knows if you're a dog, or if you run infrastructure at Facebook...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Hacker News, where a random person can tell a company their $2 billion plan on infrastructure is "a really bad move" with authority
A "random person"? How about a HN reader who is taking part in a discussion? They offered their view and why they believe that. Nowhere did they they claim "authority." Unlike your snide commentary they are actually contributing to the conversation.
Good discussion would have ensued after a statement like "I wonder why they don't build out their own infrastructure because at this scale it is usually cheaper to...".
I could imagine that with this big a deal, they could get rate reductions that get the cost down to a comparable level to building out your own datacenters (at least 2) and hiring qualified ops people.
It might very well be a bad move, but you really can't say unless you know more.
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Facebook reported $27 billion in revenue in 2016. Snap reported $400 million. You're talking two orders of magnitude lower than Facebook and almost three lower than Google. Snap simply does not have the resources to pour into custom data centers, even if they can raise $2 billion for infra over 5 years. Unless they have serious talent already, they're not going to match Google's massive 15 year investments by a long…
Yep, agreed. Snap only has 1900 employees.
Crunchbase says they have 100-250 employees. Their LinkedIn profile says 50-200.
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…
"We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years and have built our software and computer systems to use computing, storage capabilities, bandwidth, and other services provided by Google Cloud, some of which do not have an alternative in the market. We are currently negotiating an agreement with another cloud provider for redundant infrastructure support of our business operations. In the future, we may invest in building our own infrastructure to better serve our customers."
So they hit $400m of revenue in 2016 and have committed to spend at least that much on infrastructure each year for the next 5 years? After all the costs for staffing and everything else they better I hope they achieve amazing growth if they ever intend to profit.
Will Snap exist in 5 years?
I'm not sure about Twitter, Groupon, or Uber.