5 ms·

Hypothetical: If AWS was available at the time Google was just starting, would it have made sense for them to go with AWS?

by Oculus 13y ago

timdorr 13y ago
Well, AWS explicitly doesn't charge for incoming bandwidth (vs. the "special" deal they got on the 15Mbps line item) which was the majority of their costs. It may have actually made sense, depending on their computing needs.
thrownaway2424 13y ago
Definitely not. The google product is not search or gmail or any of that stuff. The google product is dirt cheap computing. Everything else google does is just an attempt to exploit that competitive advantage. Running it on anyone else's stuff would erase the advantage. Even in the collocation facilities google was developing this skill for example by installing their infamous corkboard servers with the drives attached by Velcro.
- Oculus 13y ago
  I meant the question more in the sense of starting off with AWS and moving to their own servers like it is popular for most startups to do nowadays. Though you make a good point about gaining the skills for a robust infrastructure early on being important.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    It rarely makes economical sense to start with AWS. Very few people have bursty enough traffic for it. Most sites I've dealt with don't even have a day/night cycle that's pronounced enough to justify spinning up servers just for the daily peak until they're huge. A lot do have a delusional expectation that building on AWS to handle that expected 10x overnight growth that they dream of justifies it, but that "just" justifies good caching and the ability to spin up frontends on AWS or similar if neeeded. Which ironically makes you likely to spend less on your dedicated hosting, as if your setup is ready to spin up cloud servers when the load goes too high, you can afford to get much closer to the wire before you add more dedicated hardware for your base load. For most people, renting a dedicated server (there's a huge number of providers that charge month to month, with no commitment) will come out far cheaper for anything they use more than ~8 hours a day on average. To me, if a startup puts everything on AWS, it's a sign they have poor cost control.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      From experience at RBI I had one tool that ran on aws in hindsight it woudl have been cheaper to go with linode and that was a single small instance. I noticed at silcon mikabout that prity much all the start ups where using aws - I suspect that 90% of them would struggle if they had to set up their own colo.
chubot 13y ago
Unequivocally no, because it would have been too expensive, probably at least 100x the cost. AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than owning your own hardware, and Google was leveraging economies of scale to operate much cheaper than people that owned their own hardware (e.g. fault tolerant software vs. "enterprise grade" hardware) People didn't realize it at the time, but "search" wasn't Google's only core competency. It was also "warehouse scale computing". Of course Inktomi under Eric Brewer was another search company that realized that search is a perfect application for clusters of commodity x86 hardware, or networks of workstations (which AFAIK came from academic projects like http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/ ) (Don't outsource core functions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html )
- Oculus 13y ago
  How early did Google start doing "warehouse scale computing"? I was always under the impression they started doing that as a byproduct of their large size.
  - wmf 13y ago
    Obviously it took them a while to get to warehouse scale, but I think they were thinking efficiently from the beginning, like using Legos and cheap racks to hold naked motherboards. http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/0-4-Google.htm http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/... http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_Firs...
    - mturmon 13y ago
      Here's a photo set of the initial server rack, showing the use of 1/8'' cork sheets to separate circuit boards from contacting each other: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmuseumofamericanhistory/sets/72157635280626381 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmuseumofamericanhistory...
  - 13y ago
banachtarski 13y ago
No, the already small margins would have been consumed in a heartbeat.
- Oculus 13y ago
  By small margins, do you mean at the time or currently?
  - banachtarski 13y ago
    At the time obviously. And by small, I suppose I mean negative haha.
- damian2000 13y ago
  They weren't profitable at all for several years (until AdWords) were they?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
No, for the same reason it still doesn't make sense to go with AWS. Basically you need a large number of cores that are intimately integrated amongst a large quantity of storage. It was the fact that all the machines could have a bunch of drives on them for "free" (low marginal cost). By interspersing the data and the compute you get maximum bandwidth to local assets.
- wmf 13y ago
  Isn't that how EC2 works?
  - mwcampbell 13y ago
    If I understand correctly, the problem is that persistent storage (either S3 or EBS) is network-attached, and you pay by the gigabyte and by the number of requests or IOPS.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  What classes of applications benefit from that level of integration between processing and storage? It strikes me that both AWS and various PaaS providers (especially Heroku) encourage strong separatioin between the application and its storage. Applications are supposed to treat all persistent storage as network-attached, while the VMs or containers running the appliication are ephemeral. I guess you're saying this is untenable for some kinds of application.

Hypothetical: If AWS was available at the time Google was just starting, would it have made sense for them to go with AWS?

by Oculus 13y ago

Hypothetical: If AWS was available at the time Google was just starting, would it have made sense for them to go with AWS?

timdorr 13y ago

Well, AWS explicitly doesn't charge for incoming bandwidth (vs. the "special" deal they got on the 15Mbps line item) which was the majority of their costs. It may have actually made sense, depending on their computing needs.

thrownaway2424 13y ago

Definitely not. The google product is not search or gmail or any of that stuff. The google product is dirt cheap computing. Everything else google does is just an attempt to exploit that competitive advantage. Running it on anyone else's stuff would erase the advantage. Even in the collocation facilities google was developing this skill for example by installing their infamous corkboard servers with the drives attached by Velcro.

Oculus 13y ago
I meant the question more in the sense of starting off with AWS and moving to their own servers like it is popular for most startups to do nowadays. Though you make a good point about gaining the skills for a robust infrastructure early on being important.
- vidarh 13y ago
  It rarely makes economical sense to start with AWS. Very few people have bursty enough traffic for it. Most sites I've dealt with don't even have a day/night cycle that's pronounced enough to justify spinning up servers just for the daily peak until they're huge. A lot do have a delusional expectation that building on AWS to handle that expected 10x overnight growth that they dream of justifies it, but that "just" justifies good caching and the ability to spin up frontends on AWS or similar if neeeded. Which ironically makes you likely to spend less on your dedicated hosting, as if your setup is ready to spin up cloud servers when the load goes too high, you can afford to get much closer to the wire before you add more dedicated hardware for your base load. For most people, renting a dedicated server (there's a huge number of providers that charge month to month, with no commitment) will come out far cheaper for anything they use more than ~8 hours a day on average. To me, if a startup puts everything on AWS, it's a sign they have poor cost control.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    From experience at RBI I had one tool that ran on aws in hindsight it woudl have been cheaper to go with linode and that was a single small instance. I noticed at silcon mikabout that prity much all the start ups where using aws - I suspect that 90% of them would struggle if they had to set up their own colo.

chubot 13y ago

Unequivocally no, because it would have been too expensive, probably at least 100x the cost. AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than owning your own hardware, and Google was leveraging economies of scale to operate much cheaper than people that owned their own hardware (e.g. fault tolerant software vs. "enterprise grade" hardware) People didn't realize it at the time, but "search" wasn't Google's only core competency. It was also "warehouse scale computing". Of course Inktomi under Eric Brewer was another search company that realized that search is a perfect application for clusters of commodity x86 hardware, or networks of workstations (which AFAIK came from academic projects like http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/ ) (Don't outsource core functions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html )

Oculus 13y ago
How early did Google start doing "warehouse scale computing"? I was always under the impression they started doing that as a byproduct of their large size.
- wmf 13y ago
  Obviously it took them a while to get to warehouse scale, but I think they were thinking efficiently from the beginning, like using Legos and cheap racks to hold naked motherboards. http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/0-4-Google.htm http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/... http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_First_Production_Server.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_Firs...
  - mturmon 13y ago
    Here's a photo set of the initial server rack, showing the use of 1/8'' cork sheets to separate circuit boards from contacting each other: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmuseumofamericanhistory/sets/72157635280626381 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmuseumofamericanhistory...
- 13y ago

banachtarski 13y ago

No, the already small margins would have been consumed in a heartbeat.

Oculus 13y ago
By small margins, do you mean at the time or currently?
- banachtarski 13y ago
  At the time obviously. And by small, I suppose I mean negative haha.
damian2000 13y ago
They weren't profitable at all for several years (until AdWords) were they?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

No, for the same reason it still doesn't make sense to go with AWS. Basically you need a large number of cores that are intimately integrated amongst a large quantity of storage. It was the fact that all the machines could have a bunch of drives on them for "free" (low marginal cost). By interspersing the data and the compute you get maximum bandwidth to local assets.

wmf 13y ago
Isn't that how EC2 works?
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  If I understand correctly, the problem is that persistent storage (either S3 or EBS) is network-attached, and you pay by the gigabyte and by the number of requests or IOPS.
mwcampbell 13y ago
What classes of applications benefit from that level of integration between processing and storage? It strikes me that both AWS and various PaaS providers (especially Heroku) encourage strong separatioin between the application and its storage. Applications are supposed to treat all persistent storage as network-attached, while the VMs or containers running the appliication are ephemeral. I guess you're saying this is untenable for some kinds of application.