4 ms·

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.