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Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-t

by qxi 8y ago

Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) for greener pastures? Worked for us at Twitch.

diminoten 8y ago
Oh come on, you know the performance profile of a streaming service is wildly different from a mobile ridesharing app... Their surges are nothing like yours.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Alupis 8y ago
  It still stands... $8mm monthly is over 350 full time engineers making $250k annually (ya that doesn't cover hardware, but it just illustrates the point). That would be a 22% increase in Lyft's total number of employees. If you have engineers making less than $250k annually, then you have a lot more staff. $8mm monthly is a LOT... Amazon's clearly making a profit after $8mm monthly.
  - glass_of_water 8y ago
    But it's not like Lyft would suddenly have 350 full time engineers developing new features. A large chunk of those engineers would be working on building and maintaining infrastructure that AWS provides.
    - Alupis 8y ago
      The point stands... 350 engineers is an army of engineers... for $8mm monthly, it wouldn't be unreasonable to achieve 500+ engineers depending on salaries. Lyft could definitely build and maintain their own infrastructure for this kind of money... probably do it better (customized to their needs) and cheaper.
      - sjg007 8y ago
        Probably they will do a lot of optimization once they go public. That will improve financials over a year which will help the stock unless it comes at the expense of growth. The name of the game is growth that’s what gets you the high multiples.
      - jhall1468 8y ago
        All of that is ignoring payroll taxes (for your new, very large staff), shifting all of your tax-deductible operational expenses into tax limited capital expenses. Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people. There are huge advantages to offloading non-primary business costs to other businesses. Netflix is doing this too. I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves.
        geezerjay 8y ago
        > Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people. But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM. > Netflix is doing this too. IBM stuff was bought by a lot of people. > I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves. That statement is very misguided and misses the problem. For example if you built your infrastructure around a specific solution then you also end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to a specific supplier of said infrastructure.
        jhall1468 8y ago
        > But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM. Businesses are wasteful because that's the natural status of a bureaucracy. They aren't throwing away money on infrastructure because they are unaware, they are spending more than they potentially have to because infrastructure isn't their core business. > IBM stuff was bought by a lot of people. That's such a tired argument. Just because they could save money doesn't mean it's a good idea, and with Enterprise pricing from Amazon combined with tax advantages, you honestly have no idea how much "cheaper" it really is. > That statement is very misguided and misses the problem. For example if you built your infrastructure around a specific solution then you also end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to a specific supplier of said infrastructure. No, the fact that you think this is a "problem" is the problem. Do you honestly think dev ops guys couldn't figure out how to use a different tool? By your own logic, you also shouldn't build data centers because you end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to managing your own infrastructure.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  Well, yeah, I would expect a mobile ridesharing app to have many many many order of magnitudes less server infrastructure than a streaming service. It feels like you could fit half a Lyft into live low-latency transcoding and redistribution of just the top 10 streamers feeds on Twitch.
spamizbad 8y ago
What sort of promotion metrics did your peers experience? Are we talking lateral moves, with more interesting technologies, or are we talking about movement into leadership with significant pay bumps? Also: based on this experience, what's the best technology to invest in and then abandon completely because nobody else wants to deal with it?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mylons 8y ago
true, true.
stale2002 8y ago
Umm, everyone I know is trying to move off of any existing bare metal boxes that we have. Source: also work at Twitch. Oh, or are you making fun of using Bare metal?
- PhoenixReborn 8y ago
  > constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) for greener pastures? I think the parent was pretty clearly sarcastic and suggesting that this was a bad idea.

by qxi 8y ago

diminoten 8y ago

Oh come on, you know the performance profile of a streaming service is wildly different from a mobile ridesharing app... Their surges are nothing like yours.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Alupis 8y ago
It still stands... $8mm monthly is over 350 full time engineers making $250k annually (ya that doesn't cover hardware, but it just illustrates the point). That would be a 22% increase in Lyft's total number of employees. If you have engineers making less than $250k annually, then you have a lot more staff. $8mm monthly is a LOT... Amazon's clearly making a profit after $8mm monthly.
- glass_of_water 8y ago
  But it's not like Lyft would suddenly have 350 full time engineers developing new features. A large chunk of those engineers would be working on building and maintaining infrastructure that AWS provides.
  - Alupis 8y ago
    The point stands... 350 engineers is an army of engineers... for $8mm monthly, it wouldn't be unreasonable to achieve 500+ engineers depending on salaries. Lyft could definitely build and maintain their own infrastructure for this kind of money... probably do it better (customized to their needs) and cheaper.
    - sjg007 8y ago
      Probably they will do a lot of optimization once they go public. That will improve financials over a year which will help the stock unless it comes at the expense of growth. The name of the game is growth that’s what gets you the high multiples.
    - jhall1468 8y ago
      All of that is ignoring payroll taxes (for your new, very large staff), shifting all of your tax-deductible operational expenses into tax limited capital expenses. Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people. There are huge advantages to offloading non-primary business costs to other businesses. Netflix is doing this too. I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves.
      - geezerjay 8y ago
        > Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people. But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM. > Netflix is doing this too. IBM stuff was bought by a lot of people. > I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves. That statement is very misguided and misses the problem. For example if you built your infrastructure around a specific solution then you also end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to a specific supplier of said infrastructure.
        jhall1468 8y ago
        > But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM. Businesses are wasteful because that's the natural status of a bureaucracy. They aren't throwing away money on infrastructure because they are unaware, they are spending more than they potentially have to because infrastructure isn't their core business. > IBM stuff was bought by a lot of people. That's such a tired argument. Just because they could save money doesn't mean it's a good idea, and with Enterprise pricing from Amazon combined with tax advantages, you honestly have no idea how much "cheaper" it really is. > That statement is very misguided and misses the problem. For example if you built your infrastructure around a specific solution then you also end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to a specific supplier of said infrastructure. No, the fact that you think this is a "problem" is the problem. Do you honestly think dev ops guys couldn't figure out how to use a different tool? By your own logic, you also shouldn't build data centers because you end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to managing your own infrastructure.
stefan_ 8y ago
Well, yeah, I would expect a mobile ridesharing app to have many many many order of magnitudes less server infrastructure than a streaming service. It feels like you could fit half a Lyft into live low-latency transcoding and redistribution of just the top 10 streamers feeds on Twitch.

spamizbad 8y ago

What sort of promotion metrics did your peers experience? Are we talking lateral moves, with more interesting technologies, or are we talking about movement into leadership with significant pay bumps? Also: based on this experience, what's the best technology to invest in and then abandon completely because nobody else wants to deal with it?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

mylons 8y ago

true, true.

stale2002 8y ago

Umm, everyone I know is trying to move off of any existing bare metal boxes that we have. Source: also work at Twitch. Oh, or are you making fun of using Bare metal?

PhoenixReborn 8y ago
> constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) for greener pastures? I think the parent was pretty clearly sarcastic and suggesting that this was a bad idea.