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I should have been more clear. AWS is absolutely the right choice. What I was trying to point out is someone engineered a system that costs 8M/mo to run yet on

by mv4 7y ago

I should have been more clear. AWS is absolutely the right choice. What I was trying to point out is someone engineered a system that costs 8M/mo to run yet only handles 1M rides per day.

aloknnikhil 7y ago
I don't see the analogy here. This is Lyft's core business. Of course they'll go all in. On the other hand chat is not Uber's core business. They didn't have to reinvent the wheel for an internal tool.
tanilama 7y ago
Is 8M/mo they outrageous a number here? Assuming Lyft paying 200k/year on average to its employees, 8M is about hiring 500 of them. It is sizable, not ridiculous. And optimizing your cloud cost is definitely your own responsibility and deserves every bit of attention.
CydeWeys 7y ago
So they're paying 26 cents per ride on all compute resources across their entire company? That doesn't really sound that bad, considering that rides can easily cost dozens of dollars. Just about any other non-tech business would kill for such low overhead.
- reallydude 7y ago
  > 26 cents per ride That's terrible. Other non-tech businesses, hell EVERY business that I've ever worked in that used AWS did better per transaction - healthcare, digital advertising, virtual office tooling, gaming. If you can't do better than a credit card processing fee per paid customer interaction across the company on AWS, you might as well be selling retail goods...and depending on age, your company might be soon.
  - robryan 7y ago
    Even if it is terrible, is the business such than a 26 cent overhead on rides is going to make or break it? Companies like Lyft are doing a lot more than updating a few fields for each ride. They would be processing massive amounts of location data and they are building out models to eventually use for self driving cars.
  - mv4 7y ago
    Thank you, my point exactly. Their infrastructure costs are terrible. Especially considering how easy their data is to shard etc (buyer and seller belong are in the same geo physically).

by mv4 7y ago

I should have been more clear. AWS is absolutely the right choice. What I was trying to point out is someone engineered a system that costs 8M/mo to run yet only handles 1M rides per day.

aloknnikhil 7y ago

I don't see the analogy here. This is Lyft's core business. Of course they'll go all in. On the other hand chat is not Uber's core business. They didn't have to reinvent the wheel for an internal tool.

tanilama 7y ago

Is 8M/mo they outrageous a number here? Assuming Lyft paying 200k/year on average to its employees, 8M is about hiring 500 of them. It is sizable, not ridiculous. And optimizing your cloud cost is definitely your own responsibility and deserves every bit of attention.

CydeWeys 7y ago

So they're paying 26 cents per ride on all compute resources across their entire company? That doesn't really sound that bad, considering that rides can easily cost dozens of dollars. Just about any other non-tech business would kill for such low overhead.

reallydude 7y ago
> 26 cents per ride That's terrible. Other non-tech businesses, hell EVERY business that I've ever worked in that used AWS did better per transaction - healthcare, digital advertising, virtual office tooling, gaming. If you can't do better than a credit card processing fee per paid customer interaction across the company on AWS, you might as well be selling retail goods...and depending on age, your company might be soon.
- robryan 7y ago
  Even if it is terrible, is the business such than a 26 cent overhead on rides is going to make or break it? Companies like Lyft are doing a lot more than updating a few fields for each ride. They would be processing massive amounts of location data and they are building out models to eventually use for self driving cars.
- mv4 7y ago
  Thank you, my point exactly. Their infrastructure costs are terrible. Especially considering how easy their data is to shard etc (buyer and seller belong are in the same geo physically).