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"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 cap
by stuckagain 10y ago
"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, some of which do not have an alternative in the market."
There's some numbers for you that Google wouldn't have provided (as far as I have seen).
- richardwhiuk 10y agoI find the "do not have an alternative in the market" comment interesting - is there really anything which AWS does not have the GCE does?
- chinathrow 10y agoMaybe the amount of rebates received?
- stuckagain 10y agoSnap runs on Google App Engine, not on GCE (or perhaps they use both).
- pbh101 10y agoThere isn't an alternative inasmuch as there isn't a drop-in replacement. Thus, there are switching costs, which thus represent financial (and counterparty!) risks. Compare this situation to Dell v. Lenovo v. HP commodity x86 servers: if one goes out of business, you can go to the others (and proactively use this as leverage when negotiating). EDIT: Or more realistically, you don't need to do much/any work to run your service on a Dell v. an IBM.
- whorleater 10y agoIf you're already tied into GAE, Google's other offerings in cloud become really easy to tie in, from adding buckets in GCS to adding extra stuff in GCE. With the soonish coming of Google Pub/Sub, it takes a lot of effort to switch to AWS.
- bduerst 10y agoThere's a fairly exhaustive comparison between their compute services here: https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/compute https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/compute But without anymore context into what Snapchat is saying, it's too easy to read just about anything into that comment.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- unoti 10y ago> Is there really anything which AWS does not have the GCE does? Firebase is the killer here. AWS and Azure don't have it or anything comparable for realtime data. If they do, please tell me about it because I'd love to know about it! I'm particularly interested in this because I'm building a product supported by Firebase and will have the same lock-in described in this filing.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- talklittle 10y agoCome on, HN. How can nobody be mentioning some of the much cooler stuff available on Google Cloud? https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ It's a mistake to just compare Google with AWS, thinking in terms of basic storage and computing. That's boring and obviously there are tons of alternatives, including Snap Inc. building it themselves, for the amount of money cited. When it comes to cutting edge AI and related, Google's offerings clearly stand out among other cloud services.
- vmarsy 10y agoHow is it different from Azure ML and Microsoft Cognitive services?
- theduffd 10y agoI'm guessing it's their incredible amount of user data to drive that ML and AI.
- mnutt 10y agoAre these sorts of things latency-sensitive enough that they couldn't use them with EC2 and similar? Or are the bandwidth needs so large that bandwidth charges cancel out any compute savings?
- eanzenberg 10y agoAre they charging per single prediction like amazon? If so then it's almost a non-starter unless ML is the product.
- eitally 10y agoSort of, but not exactly. https://cloud.google.com/ml/pricing https://cloud.google.com/ml/pricing
- milesward 10y agoI'll just leave this here... https://www.google.de/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=datastore+trillions+of+operations https://www.google.de/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es... Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud
- dmnd 10y agoExactly. What's the closest thing to datastore from other providers? DynamoDB? Some kind of hosted Cassandra?
- erichocean 10y agoGCE is incapable of doing the most recent cloud setup I've built on AWS, which uses g2 instances extensively (although Azure could). I need the actual GPU—graphics, OpenGL, etc.—part, not just CUDA, in addition to the hardware H.264 encoders that come with nVidia's GRID CPUs. GCE has no equivalent. We're also using Amazon's Elastic File System, and I don't think Google has an alternative—though that's something I could handle differently if I had to, at higher cost.
- boulos 10y agoWe announced that we'll have AMD's 9300x2s and NVIDIA's P100s at Supercomputing: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs-for-Google-Cloud-Platform.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs... I'd be happy to get you early access, Erich ;). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- erichocean 10y agoInteresting, I'll keep any eye out. The main renderer we use (Hydra, part of Pixar's USD[0] project) would need to be ported to run on the AMD GPU, but it's designed to be backend agnostic to a degree so it should be possible. I'm pretty sure AMD also has the ability to H.264 encode the screen at 60fps (with low latency) which is really important to us—our "workstation" is entirely in the cloud, with a Pi 3 running the display/keyboard/mouse. [0] http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html
- chinathrow 10y agoWow, single cloud lock-in filed with the SEC. Isn't 400m/y a bit steep for storage and compute power?
- brandon272 10y ago$400 million annually represents a monthly cost per user of $0.21 at 158 million daily active users. Which seems high at scale when looking at storage + bandwidth alone, I would think, but I'm also not a big Snapchat user so I'm not sure what is going on in terms of long term storage of video on an account level.
- hrrsn 10y agoI would think their bandwidth costs are astronomical. Since 19/3/16 Snapchat has used 14.8GB of mobile data on my iPhone alone - not including WiFi.
- johansch 10y agoBandwidth is kinda cheap these days though, if you avoid GC and AWS. Anyone have recent numbers at this scale of commitment?
- sjg007 10y agoThey will get a bulk discount so it will be cheap probably close to zero.
- omarchowdhury 10y agoClose to zero but $400M in related expense.
- marcamillion 10y agoI literally lolled at this comment. I assume this is sarcasm...just want to verify :)
- leothekim 10y agoIs it not possible to build your own "alternative in the market" for $2 billion?
- nlittlepoole 10y agoThere is also the opportunity cost of investing in hardware
- throwaway2048 10y agoi doubt it would involve hundreds of millions let alone billions in hardware costs.
- carlisle_ 10y agoIt is absolutely possible to build a stellar internal alternative to Google's offerings in 5 years with 2 billion dollars. edit: I should point out that this doesn't account for ramp-up. It would obviously take awhile before things would be to a point where it would be even comparable.
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- doubleorseven 10y agoJust to clarify your answer, here is another thing Google won't tell you: once you build yourself in their cloud you will have to find something else to do with all the time you used to spend on latency.
- brandon272 10y agoWhy won't Google tell you that?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- debt 10y agoThey're likely using Google's state of the art Vision/Speech API etc.
- tlogan 10y agoSo Snapchat is basically ~80% (or more) of the entire Google's cloud business (if exclude G Suite from the Google's cloud).
- golfer 10y agoHas Google published cloud revenue numbers? I haven't seen those, please link if so. Thanks
- thealfreds 10y agohttp://fortune.com/2016/10/28/google-cloud-business-2/ http://fortune.com/2016/10/28/google-cloud-business-2/ states their "other revenue" was $2.543 billion for its third quarter. A chunk of that is from Cloud. So it is definitely the largest share but not sure if it is quite 80%.
- Dragonai 10y agoJust to clarify, Snap's S-1 says they're committing $2B over the next five years (specifically, $400M per year) - the number you've provided for Google's "other revenue" is $2.543B just in Q3. Ergo, it's nowhere near 80%. :)
- thealfreds 10y agoVery correct! Got my numbers all switched around when looking for more information and was somehow thinking of 2B a year. Thank you.
- joegosse 10y agoInteresting detail from the Google license exhibit: Encryption Technologies. Google makes HTTPS encryption (also referred to as SSL or TLS connection) available. Google servers support ephemeral elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key exchange signed with RSA and ECDSA. These perfect forward secrecy (PFS) methods help protect traffic and minimize the impact of a compromised key, or a cryptographic breakthrough. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517029199/d270216dex1020.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1564408/000119312517...
- analogist 10y agoIsn't that's just a description of all TLS? ECDHE/DHE key exchange is essentially employed on any non-poorly configured modern https site, TLS 1.0-1.3draft.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- prdonahue 10y agoHow is that "interesting"? They're just saying they use ECDHE which, by definition, provides forward secrecy.
- Sindrome 10y agoI remember seeing the CTO or VP of Eng @ Snap was the Director of Eng on Google Cloud Compute. It seems to not be a coincidence.
- rrdharan 10y agoYou're thinking of Peter Magnussen but he left for Oracle shortly thereafter: https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/snapchat-vp-of-engineering-peter-magnusson-departs-startup-after-just-6-months/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/snapchat-vp-of-engineering...