5 ms·

Their model should scale linearly, because everything can be clustered/sharded by geo so nicely, and the scope of a typical transaction is one passenger vs a fe

by mv4 8y ago

Their model should scale linearly, because everything can be clustered/sharded by geo so nicely, and the scope of a typical transaction is one passenger vs a few dozen potential drivers. That does not significantly change as they grow. Unlike someone like FB, with their many-to-many everything, Lyft/Uber is a data architect's dream.

SilasX 8y ago
There's definitely something that has to scale linearly as they serve more rides; the question is how much of that 14 cents the linear-scaling stuff accounts for.
- mv4 8y ago
  I would think the bulk of it. Given their ride volume, they should be way past the fixed costs for stuff that has to be there before the 1st ride takes place. API load should be mostly linear as well. Back office, internal reporting, etc anything that deals with data in aggregate can be non-linear, but negligible in the grand scheme of things.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    In theory, yes, but you might be underestimating how much technical debt can be left behind in a scale-up. For all we know, there's a bunch of stuff that just hasn't been cleaned up. As other comments note, I can totally imagine someone saying "yeah, not worth the risk of breaking something as long as it only comes out to 14 cents a ride". Edit: And, for that matter, they may be using AWS for things other than serving rides, e.g. dev tools and internal service that scale with the number of office employees, not rides.
    - mv4 8y ago
      Yeah that $0.14 per ride may sound reasonable, until you realize (as someone pointed out earlier) that it's essentially a EC2 t3.xlarge for one whole hour. Now, imagine that your model requires a 4CPU, 16GB RAM server to handle just one ride per hour - is that really efficient?
      - SilasX 8y ago
        Oh, no, I agree it's unreasonable for what they're getting; I'm saying that it might seem small relative to the business priorities.
      - solarkraft 8y ago
        It didn't sound reasonable to me before, but you really gave me some perspective here. What the the hell are they doing? So much geo processing?
- mv4 8y ago
  ... and of course, linear is both a blessing and a curse. Lets you predict/project and buy reserved capacity nicely - yet you never truly get to enjoy the efficiencies from scale.
hinkley 8y ago
The more customers I have the more shards I have to run. Managing 5 shards is not the same amount of work as managing 50. For one the surface area for cross shard communication goes up. What happens if London or Manhattan are too big for one shard? Multi-tenant providers have been wrestling with the Big Customer problem forever, and sharding is only a bandaid.

by mv4 8y ago

SilasX 8y ago

There's definitely something that has to scale linearly as they serve more rides; the question is how much of that 14 cents the linear-scaling stuff accounts for.

mv4 8y ago
I would think the bulk of it. Given their ride volume, they should be way past the fixed costs for stuff that has to be there before the 1st ride takes place. API load should be mostly linear as well. Back office, internal reporting, etc anything that deals with data in aggregate can be non-linear, but negligible in the grand scheme of things.
- SilasX 8y ago
  In theory, yes, but you might be underestimating how much technical debt can be left behind in a scale-up. For all we know, there's a bunch of stuff that just hasn't been cleaned up. As other comments note, I can totally imagine someone saying "yeah, not worth the risk of breaking something as long as it only comes out to 14 cents a ride". Edit: And, for that matter, they may be using AWS for things other than serving rides, e.g. dev tools and internal service that scale with the number of office employees, not rides.
  - mv4 8y ago
    Yeah that $0.14 per ride may sound reasonable, until you realize (as someone pointed out earlier) that it's essentially a EC2 t3.xlarge for one whole hour. Now, imagine that your model requires a 4CPU, 16GB RAM server to handle just one ride per hour - is that really efficient?
    - SilasX 8y ago
      Oh, no, I agree it's unreasonable for what they're getting; I'm saying that it might seem small relative to the business priorities.
    - solarkraft 8y ago
      It didn't sound reasonable to me before, but you really gave me some perspective here. What the the hell are they doing? So much geo processing?
mv4 8y ago
... and of course, linear is both a blessing and a curse. Lets you predict/project and buy reserved capacity nicely - yet you never truly get to enjoy the efficiencies from scale.

hinkley 8y ago

The more customers I have the more shards I have to run. Managing 5 shards is not the same amount of work as managing 50. For one the surface area for cross shard communication goes up. What happens if London or Manhattan are too big for one shard? Multi-tenant providers have been wrestling with the Big Customer problem forever, and sharding is only a bandaid.