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That $50mm a year AWS bill seems pretty high - I think some optimizations there could easily cut this big expense...
by anonu 8y ago
That $50mm a year AWS bill seems pretty high - I think some optimizations there could easily cut this big expense...
- ec109685 8y agoBut why? Their revenue is growing faster and they aren’t running out of money.
- smolder 8y agoAt that scale, I suspect there are some ~$10k engineering-time efforts that could save them $1m a year in costs, if they already have the people on staff with the expertise. In my limited experience, a lot of opportunities like that get missed because: - an optimization is considered lower priority than feature work and bugs, so never gets staffed - it's considered risky even when it's not - it's difficult to quantify the value until the works done Aside from that, just because it may be more cost effective to use 1000 servers and 1 developer versus 200 servers and 3 developers, doesn't mean it's a sound choice. One invests in people using their brains, the other mostly disappears into raw material supply chains, building servers and infrastructure and burning fuel to run them.
- marcosdumay 8y agoHead count is not infinite. I don't agree with the GP's claim that they aren't running out of money (if they don't show a profit, they are running out of money, by definition), but developer time is a limited resource that must be carefully allocated. They have a very hard problem on their hands of estimating the revenue growth new features will bring, and compare them to costs savings from better code. I don't think anybody here has enough data to decide on this - it's not impossible that nobody there has enough data either.
- smolder 8y agoI just wanted to say I fully agree with what you said; it's a very hard problem.
- tomstoms 8y agoAlso, buying cpu power is a lot easier than recruiting devs.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]