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> move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability How exactly does that work?
by debaserab2 10y ago
> move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability
How exactly does that work?
- luhn 10y agoYeah, that was my one gripe with the comment. If you've already invested in creating your own infrastructure like Twitter has, moving to a public cloud is throwing money down the drain.
- sdenton4 10y agoOTOH, continuing to develop that infrastructure may be continuing to place money on a losing bet... If they're actually running their own infra cheaper than cloud would allow, they should absolutely keep going with their own. But it's foolish to keep doing something simply because it's what you're already doing.
- XorNot 10y agoThere's a fairly highly probability this is true? AWS/GCE are not cheap. They're cost-effective for certain classes of use-case, but beyond a given scale, or with certain base-level requirements, you're way better off colocating a bunch of a machines.
- mullen 10y agoAWS can be cheap if you architect right. However, bandwidth costs are going to kill you at AWS.
- notyourwork 10y agoMy understanding is Netflix uses AWS for their infrastructure. Are they not on a similar scale as twitter with similar needs? Or is there a difference I am not seeing, perhaps a different use case. (This is a serious question, I am not doubting you.)
- rchowe 10y agoI believe that Netflix mainly uses AWS because their needs tend to surge dramatically at certain times, so that if they built their own worldwide server network, it would have to be vastly over-provisioned for when people get home at 7 PM and start streaming. Plus they were a pretty early-adopter of AWS, and they have a ton of infrastructure running on it already.
- quickly 10y agoI'm intrigued that you're unfamiliar with the idea of a sunk cost.
- beemanners 10y agoGenerally, at any scale over ~500 computers that run continuously, investing in private infrastructure is going to be 1/2 to 1/5 the cost of public cloud, including people costs. The real levers for improving engineering spend are around complexity of your actual serving software, which doesn't depend on / isn't really influenced by who you buy your computers from.
- dpark 10y agoI don't buy that claim at all. No way you're building private infrastructure for 1/5 the cost of Azure or AWS. Or even 1/2. If you're comparing some servers in a 4th tier colo with a poor SLA to AWS and pretending that devops time is free, then sure. But if you're actually building something with comparable reliability and availability, then no way. You're going to spend a lot more than you'd expect on extra capacity, a team of service engineers, load balancers, multiple locations, etc.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y agoWhat availability does Twitter actually deliver? I might be getting mixed up with reports about other sites or biased toward older events that happened when Twitter's architecture was less mature, but it seems like it's at least a semi-regular victim of "break the Internet" phenomena.
- blakeyrat 10y agoTwitter hasn't gone down in ages. (At least 2-3 full years.) It's reliable enough that hundreds of sites use Twitter as their "if our site is down, check for updates here" alternative.
- 10y ago
- quickly 10y agoI'm intrigued that you're unfamiliar with the idea of a sunk cost.
- stale2002 10y agoPretty sure they are already on AWS, also