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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

#251

Post by patrickg_zill »

tonfa wrote: post #232
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.…

You colo bandwidth is likely not from a global CDN with hundreds of PoP: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

Bandwidth is bandwidth these days. Plenty of companies like Internap are out there that can help you with low latency bandwidth, especially when you are spending a lot.

But given that Snap could be anywhere in the USA, they could locate their servers anywhere. I wasn't pushing Denver, or the colo I am in, as the solution.

It's just kind of shocking that people are willing to pay 20 times or more the going rate for bandwidth...

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

#252

Post by obulpathi »

some_guy_there wrote: post #93
obulpathi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that speaks about the scale at which they are operating in Google Cloud. Diane Green mentioned in a recent conference that one of their healthcare customers collect about 2 PB / user. Lot of companies struggle with managing / extracting value from data. Thats where the bottle neck is usually. If they have capability to handle more data, overtime their services evolve to collect, store and process more data. O…

That seems a bit too much storage, considering that Seagate only shipped around ~ 250 Exabytes worth of HDD in 2015[1]. Being extremely generous for world supply of Hard drive, we might have had only 1000 Exabytes of storage shipped in a year. Assuming 2 Petabyte per user, mere 500,000 user will consume entire storage produced every year. May be they do, but 2 PB/user seems improbable. That's also $14k per person of…

Lets not assume that Google buys storage from Seagate. Google makes its own hardware for many things (networking, TensorFlow custom ASIC). Also I don't think that have that many number of customers.

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

#253

Post by orbitur »

andybak wrote: post #215
vincnetas wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a dog running infrastructure on FB ;)

That's unfair. From what I can tell all the canines are on the mobile app development team.

I... like the iOS Facebook app.

Especially as a fellow iOS dev, there's a few UI things I'd like to reverse engineer. Seems like every year they introduce something useful or cool-looking and I think, "Wait, how did they pull that off?"

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

#254

Post by vijucat »

user5994461 wrote: post #5

This makes no sense. One cannot spend $33M a month on Google Cloud. (Remember that it's half the price of AWS, and given a contract of that magnitude it's possible that they negotiated yet another half off). The amount of hardware and services one would get for that bill is insane. Snapchat doesn't need that much computing power and storage.

Yes, I wonder if they're over-engineering things. I've seen MongoDB, Cassandra, and MySQL, all 3 used simultaneously, for example (until a more sensible CTO came along and consolidated everything into one database).

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

#255

Post by bpicolo »

siong1987 wrote: post #14
bpicolo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that seems really high. $400m a year? They're 10% of Google's yearly cloud revenue on their own? That said it's definitely what the s-1 filing claims: "Any transition of the cloud services currently provided by Google Cloud to another cloud provider would be difficult to implement and will cause us to incur significant time and expense. We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five…

Where do you get that 10% from? From the article... "Google doesn’t break out revenues from its cloud infrastructure, choosing to lump it in with other non-advertising businesses like hardware and Google Play sales. But that segment totaled $3.4 billion in sales in the most recent quarter." Assuming that all $3.4 billion is for cloud revenue last quarter , that is still less than 10% for last quarter ($400m/4 = $100m…

Hmm, might have been looking at q4 2015 which looked like 800 million a quarter. Still, a significant share either way yeah?

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

#256

Post by smeyer »

sobinator wrote: post #94

Many talking of software here, but at this scale I think we should be looking at the cost of energy. Suppose Google has a true edge on the rest of the market in terms of what the cost of a Watt is to them. Take that outlook over the horizon of 5 years; all software arguments are thereby moot. If Google can generate a Watt in 5 years at 10% the cost that AWS can, then this drastically changes the equation.

I don't follow these things closely, but what's the reason to expect that Google will be able to generate a watt at 10% of the cost that AWS can? 10x seems like a massively impressive edge to have over another huge player in the market for a commodity good like power.

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

#257

Post by leadingthenet »

orbifold wrote: post #226
robjan wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook copied snapchat with some of the new features in Instagram. Most of the people I know migrated from Snapchat to Insta when that happened.

My understanding is that Snapchat is cool among teenagers and tweens, whereas Facebook is old news. I've watched people "use" Facebook and it seems to provide negative value. If you are interested in diverse things your feed will be a total freak show, images of deformed penises (Medizine groups have those) mixed with 5 step cooking gifs. Snapchat seems to have a much better focus on stuff people actual want to do, w…

Facebook may be old news, but Instagram certainly isn't.

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

#258

Post by brown9-2 »

late2part wrote: post #126
xux wrote: post #99

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

That random person is right. One can run a DC at scale of 50 racks at least 20% cheaper than GCP. That's $80M a year to hire 20 smart people at $2M a year and 200 reasonably smart people at $200k per year. Snap will vanish like their pictures.

This only accounts for hardware cost.

What about the cost of writing the software services that you could pay Google Cloud to use?

How much would it cost to write your own Compute Engine, or Datastore, or Pubsub, or Bigquery?

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

#259

Post by dekhn »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #89
Alex3917 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth. It's a hedge. If they don't grow as rapidly as expected then they're betting that someone else will buy the excess reserved capacity from them for close to market rates. So in the case that they only use 1.5 billion dollars worth of hosting, they're betting that they'll be out, say, $25M rather than $500M. On the other hand they want to ma…

I've never heard of anyone buying excess cloud capacity from a private party. Is this a thing? Is there a market for this? Sounds like a security nightmare.

Cycle Computing does this. ATLAS, an LHC experiment, recently demonstrated this. I even built a product at Google that made this possible. We used Native Client (users compiled their binaries using the NaCl toolchain) as one part of the security container.

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

#260

Post by brown9-2 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #22
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.

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…

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)

Like most discussions in this thread, this statement is way too general. Dropbox moved their storage from S3. What about EC2 or other AWS services they were using? Did they abandon all of those too?

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