> One acquisition was particularly interesting: Postmates, a business acquired in 2020 for $2.65B. Uber’s leadership noticed Postmates’ infrastructure costs wer

> One acquisition was particularly interesting: Postmates, a business acquired in 2020 for $2.65B. Uber’s leadership noticed Postmates’ infrastructure costs were significantly lower as a percentage than Uber spent on its infrastructure. If a16z is right that a company would be crazy to use public cloud after they had scale, then this seems imply that Uber's infrastructure has not achieved perceived the economy of scales, as Uber often boasted. This also reminds me of a previous comment about Uber's loss of productivity for not going to cloud: "no EC2-like functionality until at least 2018, probably even now. Teams would negotiate with CTO for more machines. Uber's container-based solution didn't support persistent volumes for years. Uber's distributed database was based on friendfeed's design and was notoriously harder to use than DynamoDB or Cassandra. Uber's engineers couldn't provision Cassandra instances via API. They had to fill in a 10-pager to justify their use cases. Uber's on-rack router broke back in 2017 and the networking team didn't know about it because their dashboard was not properly set up. Uber tried but failed to build anything even closer to S3. Uber's HDFS cluster was grossly inefficient and expensive. That is, Uber's productivity sucked because they didn't have the out-of-box flexibility offered by cloud"