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They're making $200 million / month based on their S-1 filing. I'm sure they've done the math and the effort to cost savings here simply isn't worth it to them.

Alupis 8y ago
Or, more likely, in the beginning AWS is what their developers knew and were familiar with, and then as time went on it was easy and convenient to just spin up "one more instance". Fast forward to today, and now it would be a serious undertaking with serious risks to move off AWS, not to mention the costs of building up the staff and assets to reimplement their requirements in parallel of AWS until reasonably confident they can flip the switch and still have an operating company afterward. So, they're probably stuck - beholden to Amazon's whims and pricing mood of the day. They've bought convenience from Amazon in trade for massive technical debt, one which may be even more costly to get out of... Or impossible. AWS isn't going to get any cheaper in the future.. Those free AWS credits Amazon gives students really pay dividends.
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  Thankfully most business leaders don’t make decisions based on cynical conspiracy theories... Arguments like yours are why business people tend to roll their eyes and ignore engineers when it comes to anything outside of engineering. Not trying to be dismissive, but you are so far from the mark I don’t know where to start...
- jmathai 8y ago
  What I'm saying is that <5% of revenues on technical infrastructure for a technology company at Lyft's stage doesn't seem that crazy to me. I agree that it would be a serious undertaking to move off AWS today. But it's probably also going to provide marginal benefit. No one on the finance side of their business is probably losing sleep over it. If/once it makes sense to move off then the finance dept will tell the eng dept they need to reign in infrastructure cost...and eng will do that.
- BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
  But AWS will get cheaper in the future, if historical trends continue. To the best of my knowledge, Amazon has never increased pricing on a service. They do, however, routinely (but unpredictably) drop prices, either directly (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction) or indirectly (every new generation of EC2 instance is marginally cheaper and/or marginally more performant than the previous generation). The “whims” of Amazon’s pricing are no more unpredictable than the pricing “mood” of your colo or your hardware vendor.

Alupis 8y ago

Or, more likely, in the beginning AWS is what their developers knew and were familiar with, and then as time went on it was easy and convenient to just spin up "one more instance". Fast forward to today, and now it would be a serious undertaking with serious risks to move off AWS, not to mention the costs of building up the staff and assets to reimplement their requirements in parallel of AWS until reasonably confident they can flip the switch and still have an operating company afterward. So, they're probably stuck - beholden to Amazon's whims and pricing mood of the day. They've bought convenience from Amazon in trade for massive technical debt, one which may be even more costly to get out of... Or impossible. AWS isn't going to get any cheaper in the future.. Those free AWS credits Amazon gives students really pay dividends.

spookthesunset 8y ago
Thankfully most business leaders don’t make decisions based on cynical conspiracy theories... Arguments like yours are why business people tend to roll their eyes and ignore engineers when it comes to anything outside of engineering. Not trying to be dismissive, but you are so far from the mark I don’t know where to start...
jmathai 8y ago
What I'm saying is that <5% of revenues on technical infrastructure for a technology company at Lyft's stage doesn't seem that crazy to me. I agree that it would be a serious undertaking to move off AWS today. But it's probably also going to provide marginal benefit. No one on the finance side of their business is probably losing sleep over it. If/once it makes sense to move off then the finance dept will tell the eng dept they need to reign in infrastructure cost...and eng will do that.
BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
But AWS will get cheaper in the future, if historical trends continue. To the best of my knowledge, Amazon has never increased pricing on a service. They do, however, routinely (but unpredictably) drop prices, either directly (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction) or indirectly (every new generation of EC2 instance is marginally cheaper and/or marginally more performant than the previous generation). The “whims” of Amazon’s pricing are no more unpredictable than the pricing “mood” of your colo or your hardware vendor.