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Snapchat does indeed currently run on GAE. In this article, I was trying to show cost of running efficient custom infrastructure to solve the problem. GAE's pe
by vijayp 13y ago
Snapchat does indeed currently run on GAE. In this article, I was trying to show cost of running efficient custom infrastructure to solve the problem. GAE's per-byte costs are higher than a custom solution operating at scale for a number of reasons, most importantly because GAE is a generic system and can't optimize for this specific use case.
As systems scale to massive numbers it's almost always more cost-effective to use custom solutions. (e.g. Twitter runs an entirely custom HW stack and this has saved them a ton of money)
- sc_throwaway 13y agoThese guys clearly do not care much about the costs right now... the more they grow the larger the drag is going to be, though. I have heard from a solid source that they're storing these images in BigTable. So, they're probably paying 0.18/GB a month (or maybe less with a deal) and then also paying for the reads and writes as units, and then also for the bandwidth (which is amplified by the # of recipients). I'm not sure if you could find a more expensive way to store images if you tried. Being in GAE means they wouldn't have peering arrangements, so they are paying top-dollar for GAE BW, where a FB or Google is paying for a fiber run and some rack space. SC are very green when it comes to the business of shuffling bits, and if they want to really play with the big boys they will have plenty of catchup to do. Google is making lots of money off them, which makes me wonder if that was part of the FB play.