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That implies their business would have data center costs beyond most tech companies (Lyft for example is spending $300 million with AWS over three years, Snap i
by cbsmith 7y ago
That implies their business would have data center costs beyond most tech companies (Lyft for example is spending $300 million with AWS over three years, Snap is spending $3 billion over five years).
Something doesn't add up here.
- cortesoft 7y agoTech companies don't necessarily spend more on computing resources than non-tech companies. The article says they had 200,000 servers in 60 datacenters. That is certainly more than most tech companies, and is not surprising. A large bank probably has more computing needs than someone like Lyft.
- cbsmith 7y ago200,000 servers isn't actually that many. 200,000 c5.xlarge's at on demand rates (which nobody with 200,000 servers pays) will cost you about $300 million a year. So they are realizing savings at about an order of magnitude higher than you'd expect cost wise. I used to work in banking... their compute needs are actually quite basic. I think what we're really seeing here is some creative accounting around how operations and costs are accounted for. They've got to be talking about costs of managing and operating their cloud as well, and most of those costs would be in terms of training & workforce retooling.