Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 164 posts

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#81

Post by devoutsalsa »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #47
koyanisqatsi wrote: post #13

Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs w…

I struggle to find one correct remark in your comment. This take clearly suggests you have never worked on any similar infrastructure / distributed systems before at scale. So you're telling me there's no backend or compute workers? And you're telling me that there are no opportunities for performance optimization? That they are already 100% native C++ services at full parallel utilization? That they've already tuned…

> Storage is cheap

Seriously. They could back up all of Twitter on Backblaze for $7/month.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#82

Post by drewbug01 »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #47
koyanisqatsi wrote: post #13

Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs w…

I struggle to find one correct remark in your comment. This take clearly suggests you have never worked on any similar infrastructure / distributed systems before at scale. So you're telling me there's no backend or compute workers? And you're telling me that there are no opportunities for performance optimization? That they are already 100% native C++ services at full parallel utilization? That they've already tuned…

> I believe they are on AWS, so hardware costs are already taken out of the equation. If so, even just moving to on-prem would save them the $1B easily.

They already run their own datacenters (not uncommon for companies started in that era). They have moved partially into the cloud for data science stuff - GCP, not AWS, according to their engineering blog.

So… odds are that there isn’t nearly as much waste as everyone wants to believe.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#83

Post by kirso »

frellus wrote: post #20

To be fair, there are going to be plenty of critical leaks coming out of Twitter with a 50% cutting of staff. That's so many whistleblowers, my backyard is completely leaf free now. Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. To be fair, I don't know if Twitter is overspending on infrastructure, but I would guess there are always places to streaml…

I am quite puzzled, at such scale with low seasonality what are the reasons they haven't moved to their own infra? Managing and hiring people to do so would result in big decrease in cost compared to the cloud.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#84

Post by meany »

SicSemperUranus wrote: post #38
seibelj wrote: post #21

Everyone on the internet knows how to run Twitter better than the richest man on earth who revolutionized both the electric car and private space industries. I wish I could invest in Twitter now but I’ll wait for the cryptocurrency launch.

Your sarcastic implication being that being good at managing car and space companies make him good at managing a social media company? Not only that, good enough to be better at it than his predecessor? Not only that , he's better at it within days of arriving? Occam's razor says he's a big impulsive dummy.

To be fair, Jack Dorsey rolled over his ownership into the new structure. There are few people who know twitter, it’s problems, and potential than him.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#85

Post by brian-armstrong »

shrubble wrote: post #27

There is plenty of opportunity to renegotiate contracts, since capacity is exploding with 400Gbit going over a single wavelength. It used to be amazing to hit 1 Tb/s with a piece of core network equipment and now it is routine... whether tjat and many other changes is enough to save 1B per year, I don't know.

What does that have to do with anything? The cost of bandwidth is just one part of infra costs, and it comes from peering agreements. Those are expensive because you're dealing with monopolies and they don't really have any reason to bargain with you.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#87

Post by paleotrope »

sigmar wrote: post #64
bagels wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any connection beyond Musk hyped it a year or two ago?

he's been hyping it non stop, including taking doge for payments with the perfume he launched last month https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aelonmusk%20doge&src=type...

People are treating Musk pronouncements like they did Trumps. Taking extremely literally even when it's obvious he's pulling your leg.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#88

Post by gpapilion »

kirso wrote: post #83
frellus wrote: post #20

To be fair, there are going to be plenty of critical leaks coming out of Twitter with a 50% cutting of staff. That's so many whistleblowers, my backyard is completely leaf free now. Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. To be fair, I don't know if Twitter is overspending on infrastructure, but I would guess there are always places to streaml…

I am quite puzzled, at such scale with low seasonality what are the reasons they haven't moved to their own infra? Managing and hiring people to do so would result in big decrease in cost compared to the cloud.

Twitter is mostly on their own infra. 1 billion is 25% of total revenue. I think they are close to that spend with cloud but it’s more like 750m if I were to venture a guess.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#89

Post by unboxingelf »

drewbug01 wrote: post #82
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle to find one correct remark in your comment. This take clearly suggests you have never worked on any similar infrastructure / distributed systems before at scale. So you're telling me there's no backend or compute workers? And you're telling me that there are no opportunities for performance optimization? That they are already 100% native C++ services at full parallel utilization? That they've already tuned…

> I believe they are on AWS, so hardware costs are already taken out of the equation. If so, even just moving to on-prem would save them the $1B easily. They already run their own datacenters (not uncommon for companies started in that era). They have moved partially into the cloud for data science stuff - GCP, not AWS, according to their engineering blog. So… odds are that there isn’t nearly as much waste as everyon…

DC is far more cost effective than public cloud for data intensive workloads.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#90

Post by hoten »

koyanisqatsi wrote: post #13

Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs w…

If they laid off 3700 people, assuming 200,000 dollars each, that's 75% of the way there.

edit: oh, I suppose you wouldn't consider personnel "infrastructure". I'll keep this up despite how off topic I am, it's interesting to compare the reduced cost in labor to the stated goal in reducing infrastructure costs. A billion here, a billion there... Soon we're talking about real money.

Post reply on HN