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>Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so. WhatsApp Stats (2014): - 450 million active users, and reached that numbe

by mythz 7y ago

>Before AWS it took thousands of people and billions in capital investment to do so. WhatsApp Stats (2014): - 450 million active users, and reached that number faster than any other company in history. - 50 billion messages every day across seven platforms (inbound + outbound) - 32 engineers, one developer supports 14 million active users - $60 million investment from Sequoia Capital Which they managed their own FreeBSD servers hosted on SoftLayer. [1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi... YouTube (2008): "YouTube grew incredibly fast, to over 100 million video views per day, with only a handful of people responsible for scaling the site" - 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects - 2 feature developers, 2 network engineers, 1 DBA "They went to a colocation arrangement. Now they can customize everything and negotiate their own contracts." "Sequoia invested a total of $11.5 million in two separate rounds and was the only venture firm to invest in the company." [3] [2] http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html

kbenson 7y ago
I'm pretty sure GP is mistaking valuation for capital. Serving half a billion or more people probably nets you a billion dollar valuation or more these days, but it in no way requires a billion dollars to provide that service in the vast majority of cases. There is a sweet spot where cloud is good and provides some benefit but, once you're serving hundreds of millions of people and have double-digit millions in investment, you can probably do significantly better cost-wise rolling your own servers. Worst case, you just throw your own hypervisor management system on them and have most of the same features you got from a cloud service. If you're smart, you can probably architect it so you have on-demand overflow capacity from a cloud provider in case there's a spike you can't account for, which is the best of both worlds.
- pard68 7y ago
  This is how we do it. Two on prem datacenters, one colo, and a handful of on-the-ready cloud providers. We serve far fewer users, but we also are getting 20 to 50k per user per year. Needless to say, at the scale we have cloud is out of the question except in catastrophic scenarios.
notatoad 7y ago
Back in the day, reddit was definitely serving a couple million users with like three staff and on-prem servers. and yeah, they were down all the time, but that didn't seem to matter to their growth.

by mythz 7y ago

kbenson 7y ago

I'm pretty sure GP is mistaking valuation for capital. Serving half a billion or more people probably nets you a billion dollar valuation or more these days, but it in no way requires a billion dollars to provide that service in the vast majority of cases. There is a sweet spot where cloud is good and provides some benefit but, once you're serving hundreds of millions of people and have double-digit millions in investment, you can probably do significantly better cost-wise rolling your own servers. Worst case, you just throw your own hypervisor management system on them and have most of the same features you got from a cloud service. If you're smart, you can probably architect it so you have on-demand overflow capacity from a cloud provider in case there's a spike you can't account for, which is the best of both worlds.

pard68 7y ago
This is how we do it. Two on prem datacenters, one colo, and a handful of on-the-ready cloud providers. We serve far fewer users, but we also are getting 20 to 50k per user per year. Needless to say, at the scale we have cloud is out of the question except in catastrophic scenarios.

notatoad 7y ago

Back in the day, reddit was definitely serving a couple million users with like three staff and on-prem servers. and yeah, they were down all the time, but that didn't seem to matter to their growth.