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Agreed. It's disingenuous of the article OP to: - only parenthetically mention colocation, as if it isn't absolutely normal to rent a rack/cage/suite as needed

Agreed. It's disingenuous of the article OP to: - only parenthetically mention colocation, as if it isn't absolutely normal to rent a rack/cage/suite as needed from an existing DC operator (which in addition would make datacenter rent an OpEx and actual server equipment be amortized over 2-3 years, not the 10 for real property) - somehow present "intercontinental traffic" as something both necessary and tremendously expensive, as if all the major public clouds aren't charging 10x what the market rates for bandwidth are - imply that "the cloud" is immune to outages, as if GCP didn't have multiple major global- or region-wide outages over the past few years I mean, I understand why most companies don't go on-prem despite all that, but this series of tweets is borderline FUD.

kemitche 8y ago
I'm not sure the article OP is being disingenuous. It's a thread _specifically_ about Lyft's costs - and Lyft is clearly at a scale where they would NOT be colocating.
- Slartie 8y ago
  Of course they would. They are a taxi service, not a Dropbox or YouTube. They do neither have obscene demand for storage, nor for bandwidth, they need some servers tracking their users coordinates, running a "who is nearest" search in case someone wants a ride, some GPS navigation/pathfinding during the ride and some billing code after it. If you don't blow this up to stupid proportions, that should be able to run on modern hardware in a few racks at a colo for millions of users per day, especially since you can neatly shard the load geographically, thus distributing load (and rented racks) over multiple DCs, ideally with failover in place for emergencies. The only thing they really need to merge is the billing data at the end, but handling billing data of a global userbase of tens or hundreds of millions of users in a single system is a solved problem nowadays and does not even constitute a case worthy of the overused "big data" moniker.
- ADefenestrator 8y ago
  Colo can mean "rent a suite from DRT in one location and a building in another" in addition to space in a rack. Lyft's probably around that size (and it's a good idea to do some colo to gain experience before trying to build out your own anyways)

kemitche 8y ago

I'm not sure the article OP is being disingenuous. It's a thread _specifically_ about Lyft's costs - and Lyft is clearly at a scale where they would NOT be colocating.

Slartie 8y ago
Of course they would. They are a taxi service, not a Dropbox or YouTube. They do neither have obscene demand for storage, nor for bandwidth, they need some servers tracking their users coordinates, running a "who is nearest" search in case someone wants a ride, some GPS navigation/pathfinding during the ride and some billing code after it. If you don't blow this up to stupid proportions, that should be able to run on modern hardware in a few racks at a colo for millions of users per day, especially since you can neatly shard the load geographically, thus distributing load (and rented racks) over multiple DCs, ideally with failover in place for emergencies. The only thing they really need to merge is the billing data at the end, but handling billing data of a global userbase of tens or hundreds of millions of users in a single system is a solved problem nowadays and does not even constitute a case worthy of the overused "big data" moniker.
ADefenestrator 8y ago
Colo can mean "rent a suite from DRT in one location and a building in another" in addition to space in a rack. Lyft's probably around that size (and it's a good idea to do some colo to gain experience before trying to build out your own anyways)