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$50k/month comes out to $600k/year which is the cost around 2-3 engineers counting overhead. To manage infrastructure at that scale themselves they'd need some
by marcinzm 8y ago
$50k/month comes out to $600k/year which is the cost around 2-3 engineers counting overhead.
To manage infrastructure at that scale themselves they'd need someone who knows DevOps. To write services at that scale they'd need someone who knows backend engineering and micro services. Then they'd need to be able to have 24/7 on call rotations for when things break. And of course, like any rewrite it seems like a "couple month" project until you get into the details and it becomes a two year project. Soon you've got a full 6+ person team and are paying them a lot more than $600k/year.
- manigandham 8y agoAnd some projects really are just simple. Scale makes no difference to their services, it's a basic OLTP + search with resizing image proxy. This doesn't have any SLAs nor is it critical software either. 24/7 oncall is completely unnecessary.
- tpetry 8y agoDon‘t underestimate the massive cpu power needed for scaling images at their request rate
- nine_k 8y agoMaybe some caching would help.
- abhiyerra 8y agoWonder if they could use S3 bucket with a lambda to resize. I’m sure their images are a long tail so certain images likely have way more traffic than others. At a previous company where we were also doing a lot of imgix traffic we did something like this but with a go service but now I’d just offload to s3 and use lambda to avoid Devops..
- scarface74 8y agoI’ve done exactly this. But not at any scale. But if they are specializing in this and with low margins, AWS is not the answer. The compute cost would be relatively cheap and possibly even the storage cost. I would think that the bandwidth costs would be expensive.
- philliphaydon 8y agoA friend of mine runs a site which uses aws s3 and lambda resizing, but cache is via BunnyCDN. His costs are low after moving from aws cloudfront, and he’s serving ~400m images a day. (This is run by a company of 2 staff) Just because everything is in AWS doesn’t force you to use all of AWS services.
- superwayne 8y agoDo you happen to have a link?
- manigandham 8y agohey man, nice seeing you here.
- m0zg 8y agoWhy would it depend on request rate rather than upload rate? Just pre-scale several variants on upload. Then run an MR job every now and then and delete the variants that haven't been touched for more than e.g. a month. Scale those on demand, store recents and frequently accessed pre-scaled. This is literally a few days of work.
- manigandham 8y agoIt's much nicer to be able to resize on demand. Many CDNs and image/file hosting services offer transform abilities via URL which makes it easy to get exactly what you need and optimize for every site and device. But since images are immutable, this is a perfect use-case for lambda functions fronted by a CDN.
- puzzle 8y agoI bet there's a very long tail, i.e. the majority of images are rarely accessed, if ever.
- manigandham 8y agoWe run an ad platform that resizes, crops to the important section, transforms with text, and more with billions of requests per day. It's very cacheable, horizontally scalable, and CPU is cheap. The main scaling challenge here is serving and bandwidth, both of which are handled by their CDN. I expect 5 figure costs for that but the rest of the platform is very expensive.
- so_tired 8y agoI just had a look at your b2b site Do you actually run pay-per-action campaigns, or do you provide a dashboard for the customer data ?
- manigandham 8y agoWe started as a native ad network and have pivoted to B2B with our own proprietary B2B data, which then powers a platform to run campaigns for marketers, and intel for sales teams. We also have a legacy adnetwork business for publishers.
- Jommi 8y ago600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble. You could get just as talented of a team from a Nordic Country for example and only pay 120kish
- erikbye 8y agoCan confirm. In fact, you can get talented people starting at 70k. Hire some remotes. Most local companies can only offer non-inspiring typical enterprise work, and that's why you can get people at such low cost.
- spockz 8y agoRealistically the costs for the company are higher. At least in The Netherlands the total costs for the employer is between 2-3x because of social security, health insurance, pension, housing/office costs.
- thepangolino 8y agoI have experience with Belgium, the 2 - 3x ratio is only true when considering the net wage of the employee.
- jacquesm 8y agoI've been an employer in NL for close to 30 years and the 2-3x fully loaded is not supported by any data that I'm aware of. 1.5 or so is more like it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Jommi 8y agoNot even close to true. Especially when comparing California with EU countries, even high tax rate ones. The difference between net salary and what company pays is actually very similar.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago> 600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble. Nope. You're forgetting the cost to the company is the burdened labor cost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_burden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_burden), not just wages. Payroll taxes, benefits, office space and equipment, etc. can add another 30-40% to the cost of wages.
- adrianN 8y ago600k a year gets you at least five good developers in Berlin.
- jacquesm 8y agoAnd 10-12 in Poznan or Warsaw.