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Lyft Files S-1

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Re: Lyft Files S-1

#241

Post by wil421 »

zjaffee wrote: post #119
wil421 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they become a data center company? There are 1000s of huge companies using a mix of colocated DCs, their own DCs, and cloud providers like AWS including the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Most of them are not datacenter companies like QTS.

Most of these companies aren't managing their own data centers at least for areas that use a large amount of compute. Banks and the like that have their own data centers, generally are still using some type of contractor to manage the physical real estate, network connections, ect. even if they are the ones purchasing the servers.

Come on, that’s like saying Google has no business having datacenters because they are an Advertising and Search company. Of course large companies will have contractors to scale up and down. They will have FTEs doing System Administration and Software Engineering on the servers.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#242

Post by kerng »

cheeze wrote: post #147
carlisle_ wrote: post #138

Earlier 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…

Google is a bad comparison here IMO because Google IS a datacenter company. No different than Amazon... They run datacenters and offer IaaS to customers, and piggy back off of that. I agree with you on Uber and Facebook though.

To host your own infra, you dont need to build data centers, etc. Many just rent out physical space in datacenters.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#243

Post by Alupis »

diminoten wrote: post #216
qxi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) f…

Oh come on, you know the performance profile of a streaming service is wildly different from a mobile ridesharing app... Their surges are nothing like yours.

It still stands... $8mm monthly is over 350 full time engineers making $250k annually (ya that doesn't cover hardware, but it just illustrates the point). That would be a 22% increase in Lyft's total number of employees.

If you have engineers making less than $250k annually, then you have a lot more staff. $8mm monthly is a LOT...

Amazon's clearly making a profit after $8mm monthly.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#244

Post by spamizbad »

qxi wrote: post #188
KerrickStaley wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) f…

What sort of promotion metrics did your peers experience? Are we talking lateral moves, with more interesting technologies, or are we talking about movement into leadership with significant pay bumps? Also: based on this experience, what's the best technology to invest in and then abandon completely because nobody else wants to deal with it?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#245

Post by Alupis »

fierro wrote: post #154
geezerjay wrote: post #72

Earlier 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

> person who knows how hard it is to run your own infrastructure

> fierro Profile: SWE @ Google Resource & Capacity Planning

I think you mean "Person who's job it is to convince others it's really hard and they should just buy your product"...?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#246

Post by jonknee »

zjaffee wrote: post #124
darkerside wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2017 Compared to 2018 * As a percentage of revenue, cost of revenue decreased from 62% to 58%. * As a percentage of revenue, sales and marketing expenses decreased from 54% to 37%. These seem to be positive signs.

This also implies that the vast majority (if not all of their) loss is sales and marketing.

Yes, when you don't count expenses it sure is a lot easier to make a profit!

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#247

Post by eropple »

peteradio wrote: post #240
eropple wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, having read your other comments: I'll answer that question if you demonstrate to me an understanding of the difference between $300M/3 years capex and $8M/month/3 years opex. If you do that, though, my answer will be "right, so we're done here."

I'm mostly just having a laugh so I won't be able to explain the difference. If the money works in ways a lay man is familiar I'd expect I would be able to afford the necessary man power and equipment so far under 8m per month after equipment purchase that I don't really need to know the details of the finance opex/Capex difference. I really appreciate you taking the time to bring up your good points.

I think you're underestimating how much it costs to do what Lyft does. There's a list elsewhere in this thread.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#248

Post by mcqueenjordan »

geezerjay wrote: post #72
phamilton wrote: post #61

Earlier 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?

Is there a strategic advantage for a shoemaker to make their own hammer?

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#249

Post by kerng »

ndarwincorn wrote: post #168
carlisle_ wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google wasn't really a cloud provider for like 15 years and hosted their own infrastructure that entire time.

That's not exactly fair, the first decade+ of that pre-dates the public cloud.

The idea to use hosting is much older. Many companies offered services like that even in the 90s with AWS it really scaled up and the quality for hosting then improved across the globe.

Re: Lyft Files S-1

#250

Post by halbritt »

eropple wrote: post #182
halbritt wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ne…

Fully agreed on all points. But it remains a really hard problem. And when you start to do it out at the scale of something like Lyft, you're gonna blow through your available parts of that $300m (because you can't spend it all up front, obviously) pretty quick. The care and feeding of fleets of (physical) machines is really, really hard and not to be underestimated.

The thing is, it's not really hard. Quantum computing is hard. Managing IT infrastructure as a value-added component of the business that evolves continuously vs. a cost-center to be bought and forgot is actually not that hard. The only thing hard about that is culture shift.

It's all about leadership. The dearth of skilled leadership is the issue. I'd wager this is how some FAANG companies are managing this. They're hiring people that know what they're doing. One doesn't need to design and build their own servers and network hardware to do well at the scale of folks like Dropbox or Lyft.

Cloud adoption is all about making the issue someone else's problem, which is only kicking the can down the road. Eventually, every company that does a thing will realize that their survival is contingent upon becoming a software company that does that thing.

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