15 ms·

>In January 2019, we entered into an addendum to our commercial agreement with AWS, pursuant to which we committed to spend an aggregate of at least $300 millio

by us0r 8y ago

>In January 2019, we entered into an addendum to our commercial agreement with AWS, pursuant to which we committed to spend an aggregate of at least $300 million between January 2019 and December 2021 on AWS services. If we fail to meet the minimum purchase commitment during any year, we may be required to pay the difference, which could adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations. Not as bad as snap but what could they possibly be spending $100 million a year on?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
oneplane 8y ago
Even medium retail easily does 10 million per month.
- oneplane 8y ago
  Not sure what all the downvotes are about, but spending a bunch of money on your (virtual) datacenter isn't a new or strange thing. Whereas Lyft might not spend it on processes that deal with physical products, they do have a much larger amount of connected clients and data processing. While in theory you'd "just need a database and some REST API" it is never as simple as that. Say you have one set of systems for production, you may want one or more duplicates for engineering purposes. And then you'll want tools to managed those systems, and tools to manage those tools. Then there is AAA, versioning and storage, and you'll have some sort of forensic/auditing log. Up to some point, what makes a system expensive isn't the one set of parts that make production, that is just the tip of the iceberg. It's that you need everything else as well. So regardless on whether you are doing a relatively simple service (getting people from A to B), or doing buying, sales and logistics for retail, which isn't rocket science either, you get the same initial cost and overhead.
bluedino 8y ago
That would buy a couple racks worth of servers and plenty of ops staff wouldn’t it?
- CondensedBrain 8y ago
  Then they slowly turn into a datacenter company and lose sight of being a ride sharing company. That's the same reason billion dollar companies rent buildings instead of owning them.
  - piker 8y ago
    This analogy somewhat fails given that buildings and equipment are a generally fixed cost/asset, whereas compute power, storeage, etc. are probably more of marginal costs for a technology company such as Lyft. It would suggest they also contract out most of their technology development as well.
    - buboard 8y ago
      It doesn't own cars, doesnt employ drivers, doesnt own hardware, doesn't own compute or storage , doesnt develop software. What is lyft after all?
      - throwawaymath 8y ago
        It's just an idea. This is a little tongue in cheek, but: Lyft is an abstraction. It doesn't own anything or have any customers because it's a market maker. Lyft is an efficiency mechanism for maximizing liquidity and minimizing bid-ask spreads in hyperlocal ride trading :)
        buboard 8y ago
        making the world a better place, one contractor at a time
      - kerng 8y ago
        A copy of Uber? They let Uber do all the dirt work and try to stay in the shadows.
  - joering2 8y ago
0xB31B1B 8y ago
Running fraud detection models Giant EMR clusters to develop fraud models Running a giant dynamic marketplace Running giant EMR jobs for pricing/demand
phamilton 8y ago
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 much data. Maybe they have 100PB of data in S3. Assuming 1B rides since day 1, that's 100MB per ride, which seems high. If the average ride is 20 minutes, that's 80KB per second. That would be 25% of the budget. But assuming they generate 80KB/s/ride, that's ~1MB/second (assuming 1M rides/day). So maybe all of that hits DynamoDB, and between duplicate data, secondary indexes, and size of dataset we have 6 million write iops. And then we do big data processing jobs and have 5x the read load. That's 20% of the budget. And to process all these events there is a massive EMR cluster of bare metal instances. About 1750 of them. That's 50% of the budget. Leaving 5% (a measly 400k) for load balancers, and the like. Those numbers are all a little outrageous to me, but I can see how they might be using that much.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?
  - godzillabrennus 8y ago
    Very much so. The cost benefit analysis must also question how much it would cost to educate the teams on the new hosting tools. Management has clearly decided that it’s not worth the retraining and loss of productivity.
    - julianozen 8y ago
      Will add if lyft is using things like dynamodb, there is no good onprem alternatives that they can easily migrate to without significant rewrites of core business logic This is expensive and risky and also difficult to do in piece meal Disclaimer: former AWS + Amazon employee
  - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
whyaduck 8y ago
I expect that support, consulting and development could all be part of their commercial agreement.
reaperducer 8y ago
Not as bad as snap but what could they possibly be spending $100 million a year on? Maybe they're harvesting more than ride information. Perhaps they're aggregating behavioral data on customers to sell.
peteradio 8y ago
Amazon gave them the fuck off price and they signed the contract.
sealthedeal 8y ago
that is absurd...
ukoki 8y ago
> Not as bad as snap but what could they possibly be spending $100 million a year on? They are working on self-driving cars — which likely comes with massive storage requirements for recorded sensor data, and the compute to crunch it.
- hoschicz 8y ago
  Is Lyft itself working on self-driving cars? I thought that GM and Alphabet (which are both investors in Lyft) are doing that and Lyft itself is doing no self-driving car research. EDIT: now I see, page 3: "Simultaneously, we are building our own world-class autonomous vehicle system at our Level 5 Engineering Center, with the goal of ensuring access to affordable and reliable autonomous technology"

by us0r 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

oneplane 8y ago

Even medium retail easily does 10 million per month.

oneplane 8y ago
Not sure what all the downvotes are about, but spending a bunch of money on your (virtual) datacenter isn't a new or strange thing. Whereas Lyft might not spend it on processes that deal with physical products, they do have a much larger amount of connected clients and data processing. While in theory you'd "just need a database and some REST API" it is never as simple as that. Say you have one set of systems for production, you may want one or more duplicates for engineering purposes. And then you'll want tools to managed those systems, and tools to manage those tools. Then there is AAA, versioning and storage, and you'll have some sort of forensic/auditing log. Up to some point, what makes a system expensive isn't the one set of parts that make production, that is just the tip of the iceberg. It's that you need everything else as well. So regardless on whether you are doing a relatively simple service (getting people from A to B), or doing buying, sales and logistics for retail, which isn't rocket science either, you get the same initial cost and overhead.

bluedino 8y ago

That would buy a couple racks worth of servers and plenty of ops staff wouldn’t it?

CondensedBrain 8y ago
Then they slowly turn into a datacenter company and lose sight of being a ride sharing company. That's the same reason billion dollar companies rent buildings instead of owning them.
- piker 8y ago
  This analogy somewhat fails given that buildings and equipment are a generally fixed cost/asset, whereas compute power, storeage, etc. are probably more of marginal costs for a technology company such as Lyft. It would suggest they also contract out most of their technology development as well.
  - buboard 8y ago
    It doesn't own cars, doesnt employ drivers, doesnt own hardware, doesn't own compute or storage , doesnt develop software. What is lyft after all?
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      It's just an idea. This is a little tongue in cheek, but: Lyft is an abstraction. It doesn't own anything or have any customers because it's a market maker. Lyft is an efficiency mechanism for maximizing liquidity and minimizing bid-ask spreads in hyperlocal ride trading :)
      - buboard 8y ago
        making the world a better place, one contractor at a time
    - kerng 8y ago
      A copy of Uber? They let Uber do all the dirt work and try to stay in the shadows.
- joering2 8y ago

0xB31B1B 8y ago

Running fraud detection models Giant EMR clusters to develop fraud models Running a giant dynamic marketplace Running giant EMR jobs for pricing/demand

phamilton 8y ago

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 much data. Maybe they have 100PB of data in S3. Assuming 1B rides since day 1, that's 100MB per ride, which seems high. If the average ride is 20 minutes, that's 80KB per second. That would be 25% of the budget. But assuming they generate 80KB/s/ride, that's ~1MB/second (assuming 1M rides/day). So maybe all of that hits DynamoDB, and between duplicate data, secondary indexes, and size of dataset we have 6 million write iops. And then we do big data processing jobs and have 5x the read load. That's 20% of the budget. And to process all these events there is a massive EMR cluster of bare metal instances. About 1750 of them. That's 50% of the budget. Leaving 5% (a measly 400k) for load balancers, and the like. Those numbers are all a little outrageous to me, but I can see how they might be using that much.

geezerjay 8y ago
At this point isn't it cost-effective for Lyft to just build its own infrastructure?
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Very much so. The cost benefit analysis must also question how much it would cost to educate the teams on the new hosting tools. Management has clearly decided that it’s not worth the retraining and loss of productivity.
  - julianozen 8y ago
    Will add if lyft is using things like dynamodb, there is no good onprem alternatives that they can easily migrate to without significant rewrites of core business logic This is expensive and risky and also difficult to do in piece meal Disclaimer: former AWS + Amazon employee
- 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

whyaduck 8y ago

I expect that support, consulting and development could all be part of their commercial agreement.

reaperducer 8y ago

Not as bad as snap but what could they possibly be spending $100 million a year on? Maybe they're harvesting more than ride information. Perhaps they're aggregating behavioral data on customers to sell.

peteradio 8y ago

Amazon gave them the fuck off price and they signed the contract.

sealthedeal 8y ago

that is absurd...

ukoki 8y ago

> Not as bad as snap but what could they possibly be spending $100 million a year on? They are working on self-driving cars — which likely comes with massive storage requirements for recorded sensor data, and the compute to crunch it.

hoschicz 8y ago
Is Lyft itself working on self-driving cars? I thought that GM and Alphabet (which are both investors in Lyft) are doing that and Lyft itself is doing no self-driving car research. EDIT: now I see, page 3: "Simultaneously, we are building our own world-class autonomous vehicle system at our Level 5 Engineering Center, with the goal of ensuring access to affordable and reliable autonomous technology"