7 ms·

Uber hosts its own infrastructure, so does Google, so does Facebook. All three of those companies have no problems remaining focused on their business models wi

Uber hosts its own infrastructure, so does Google, so does Facebook. All three of those companies have no problems remaining focused on their business models without turning into a "datacenter company." I strongly dislike the notion that on-prem hosting is somehow a bad thing, or too cumbersome, or otherwise totally solved by cloud providers. AWS specifically is hugely convenient in a number of ways, but it doesn't come close to the cost savings from running your own infrastructure. You need a pretty large amount of capital and engineering talent, but it really is worth it even in the short term (~3-5 years). I think people would be shocked at what the money comes out to be if they saw costs from companies doing their own physical infrastructure. AWS makes you pay through the nose, seeing the difference would change a lot of minds I'm sure.

djsumdog 8y ago
The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services. Sure you can run your own DBs instead of using RDS, but what if you start using their proprietary rubbish, like Knesis or DynamoDB? You have to rewrite application to use something else that's open source and self-hostable. For new startups, I honestly recommend using DigitalOcean or Vultur. You don't get all the AWS components, but you can build around flexibility. If you have to move, you can take all your Terraform and Anisble scripts, and port them to a new provider (and yes, you do have to rewrite your Terraform config. Every provider is insanely different and the magic of multi-cloud is a myth, but it's still easier than trying to move off of AWS specific services). I remember back in the day, Stackoverflow ran everything off of a single, very expensive, dedicated server. I've worked at other shops where we've migrated stuff from AWS to self hosted solutions to reduce our $200k/month AWS bill.
- CondensedBrain 8y ago
  Netflix and its (ongoing?) transition from AWS to its own systems might provide some guidance if they ever decide to do the same.
  - sciurus 8y ago
    What transition are you talking about?
    - CondensedBrain 8y ago
      The one I misremembered and that apparently never happened.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  > The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services. The trouble when people build things that have nothing to do with their core value propositions, they get locked into those services too. It is very easy for companies to get locked into their own homebrew garbage frameworks, clustering solutions, reporting & data analysis apps, or whatever else people hacked up because "omg vendor lockin!!".
  - chillacy 8y ago
    Seriously, I hear the same argument with frameworks too. At the end of the day it isn’t a choice between framework A and no framework, it’s going to be a framework A and your custom baked framework, and do you really have the time to spend reinventing the wheel?
cheeze 8y ago
Google is a bad comparison here IMO because Google IS a datacenter company. No different than Amazon... They run datacenters and offer IaaS to customers, and piggy back off of that. I agree with you on Uber and Facebook though.
- carlisle_ 8y ago
  Google wasn't really a cloud provider for like 15 years and hosted their own infrastructure that entire time.
  - ndarwincorn 8y ago
    That's not exactly fair, the first decade+ of that pre-dates the public cloud.
    - kerng 8y ago
      The idea to use hosting is much older. Many companies offered services like that even in the 90s with AWS it really scaled up and the quality for hosting then improved across the globe.
      - mrep 8y ago
        Did they offer services like RDS, S3, SNS, SQS, Autoscaling, Route 53, load balancing... because those are what make AWS so valuable.
        kerng 8y ago
        SQL and Domain Names was very common even in the 90s. The other concepts hadn't really evolved. Even AWS only had EC2 and S3 in the beginning. I'm just trying to relate and point out that Google decided to self host, rather then depend on someone else - which for a business that exponentialy grows is the best way, even today.
- kerng 8y ago
lmm 8y ago
Google have struggled to retain focus. And when they started out, they chose to compete on datacenters as a core competency: their corporate history is full of the idea that they could run a search engine cheaper/better than competitors by using commodity PCs and that kind of thing. Facebook is a similar story: being the biggest website in the world is a core competency for them, and one of the ways they outcompeted rivals early on was by scaling their website better. Uber has yet to turn a profit. If datacenters are a part of your business proposition - not necessarily "we're selling datacenters to other people" but rather "we will be able to outcompete our rivals because our datacenter strategy will be better" - then self-hosting makes sense. But if the datacenter is a commodity from the point of view of your business - and I would assume that would be the case for Lyft - then it makes sense to buy off the shelf.

djsumdog 8y ago

The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services. Sure you can run your own DBs instead of using RDS, but what if you start using their proprietary rubbish, like Knesis or DynamoDB? You have to rewrite application to use something else that's open source and self-hostable. For new startups, I honestly recommend using DigitalOcean or Vultur. You don't get all the AWS components, but you can build around flexibility. If you have to move, you can take all your Terraform and Anisble scripts, and port them to a new provider (and yes, you do have to rewrite your Terraform config. Every provider is insanely different and the magic of multi-cloud is a myth, but it's still easier than trying to move off of AWS specific services). I remember back in the day, Stackoverflow ran everything off of a single, very expensive, dedicated server. I've worked at other shops where we've migrated stuff from AWS to self hosted solutions to reduce our $200k/month AWS bill.

CondensedBrain 8y ago
Netflix and its (ongoing?) transition from AWS to its own systems might provide some guidance if they ever decide to do the same.
- sciurus 8y ago
  What transition are you talking about?
  - CondensedBrain 8y ago
    The one I misremembered and that apparently never happened.
spookthesunset 8y ago
> The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services. The trouble when people build things that have nothing to do with their core value propositions, they get locked into those services too. It is very easy for companies to get locked into their own homebrew garbage frameworks, clustering solutions, reporting & data analysis apps, or whatever else people hacked up because "omg vendor lockin!!".
- chillacy 8y ago
  Seriously, I hear the same argument with frameworks too. At the end of the day it isn’t a choice between framework A and no framework, it’s going to be a framework A and your custom baked framework, and do you really have the time to spend reinventing the wheel?

cheeze 8y ago

Google is a bad comparison here IMO because Google IS a datacenter company. No different than Amazon... They run datacenters and offer IaaS to customers, and piggy back off of that. I agree with you on Uber and Facebook though.

carlisle_ 8y ago
Google wasn't really a cloud provider for like 15 years and hosted their own infrastructure that entire time.
- ndarwincorn 8y ago
  That's not exactly fair, the first decade+ of that pre-dates the public cloud.
  - kerng 8y ago
    The idea to use hosting is much older. Many companies offered services like that even in the 90s with AWS it really scaled up and the quality for hosting then improved across the globe.
    - mrep 8y ago
      Did they offer services like RDS, S3, SNS, SQS, Autoscaling, Route 53, load balancing... because those are what make AWS so valuable.
      - kerng 8y ago
        SQL and Domain Names was very common even in the 90s. The other concepts hadn't really evolved. Even AWS only had EC2 and S3 in the beginning. I'm just trying to relate and point out that Google decided to self host, rather then depend on someone else - which for a business that exponentialy grows is the best way, even today.
kerng 8y ago

lmm 8y ago

Google have struggled to retain focus. And when they started out, they chose to compete on datacenters as a core competency: their corporate history is full of the idea that they could run a search engine cheaper/better than competitors by using commodity PCs and that kind of thing. Facebook is a similar story: being the biggest website in the world is a core competency for them, and one of the ways they outcompeted rivals early on was by scaling their website better. Uber has yet to turn a profit. If datacenters are a part of your business proposition - not necessarily "we're selling datacenters to other people" but rather "we will be able to outcompete our rivals because our datacenter strategy will be better" - then self-hosting makes sense. But if the datacenter is a commodity from the point of view of your business - and I would assume that would be the case for Lyft - then it makes sense to buy off the shelf.