just is positive assessment about relative size. I could be wrong about positive statement of course. But it seems very low amount for a cloud service.
I wast trying to understand how business thinking work. Not judge or praise it.
A rare insight into the scale of cloud services. Amazon and Microsoft and Google generally keep extremely tight-lipped about the scale they are operating at.
What are you trying to decide based on their cloud platform revenue? I'm genuinely curious as to why it matters if they are huge or actually the largest on the planet.
"I stated that lower infrastructure costs are a benefit of smaller scale"
I find this statement confusing. Perhaps in terms of absolute numbers, infrastructure costs are less at smaller scale, but as a percentage of revenue, larger scale usually shows increased infrastructure leverage, until you get to Microsoft/Google/Facebook size, and start designing your own Servers, Power Supplies, Storage, etc...
It's completely reasonable to compare companies against each other to determine their success - particularly when being the leader gives you network-effect benefits.
If that’s your opinion I’d like to hear your rebuttal to this [1]. It’s hard to argue against actual numbers for an actual production app running at actual scale.
Yes, the premise of this article almost immediately struck me as being quite off base. The economics of pure tech companies at this point are well understood: large up front investment with near-zero (but importantly not actually zero) marginal costs.
This article seems to be written by someone who doesn't understand the engineering side of things. At scale, the extremely low cost of serving an individual request ends up being potentially costly in aggregate, which is why the larger a web service gets, the more important performance becomes.
My point is that it is easy to tell in the restaurant, and it is not easy to tell in a cloud storage context. We're not disagreeing about the former.
I actually have cloud storage customers at my company. If you asked me what an unreasonable amount of cloud storage consumption was, I would have a really hard time coming up with a number. A petabyte, I guess? We have customers that store kilobytes, and others that store many terabytes. Frankly we'd love a petabyte customer, because we actually charge people for storage, like any sane B2B storage offering. Some things are not meant to be unlimited.
it's just a comparison to give you a sense of what those numbers look like, order of magnitude comparisons. I didn't find it misleading, and didn't think it meant that you'd be able to run twitter on their db on one commodity server. But it's an order of magnitude estimate to give you a sense of the scale.
My first thought is that that figure seems somewhat low for an established company with 750k users (even if a significant proportion are not paying customers).
Business 101: Whenever you see a ridiculously huge growth figure like 103%, it's usually measured against a tiny base. See http://xkcd.com/1102/
Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.
"provided that you are operating at sufficient scale"
Where "sufficient scale" probably means you're spending 100k+ a year on infrastructure. Let alone staff costs to support it. Also in your example you have no datacenter redundancy so it's 44k if you want to be in 2 DCs, which means "sufficient scale" is probably more like 200k+.
"if you don't exceed 1 gigabit/s at the 95th percentile"
That's a big if, the internet, startups and business in general are uncertain and it's often very difficult to know what your 95th percentile will look like in the future.
Also, it's unlikely that your network utilization is constant. A utilization rate of 50% would be ambitious.
So a better comparison is 44k for 1gig in 2 datacenters vs 102k for AWS (17/2*12), assuming you can predict your network utilization pretty well.
I think this is more correlated to maturity than size. It's just that size is highly correlated to maturity.
I've been in large companies where I was the admin/owner of their AWS account. And I've worked at companies with 200 people where I have to submit tickets to get anything created in AWS. The major difference was how mature the product was.
Sorry but this is not 'ideal', this is Capacity Planning 101. If you're launching a new product which you expect to be very popular, take your peak traffic and double or quadruple it and build out infrastructure to handle it ahead of time. I thought this was the whole point of the "cloud"? Add a metric shit-ton of resources for a planned peak and dial it down after.
Paul is nice so we are nice.
Last time I checked, I haven't built a service with +20mm users. I Googled you. I don't think you have built a service with +20mm users.
Programming is hard. Scaling is harder.
Let's have some empathy here. I bet the Instagram team has parents and siblings and significant others and friends that they haven't seen in a while. I bet they have responsibilities that they have neglected to keep the service up. I'd rather not poop on their head when they are trying to scale their service by millions of users.
This stuff is hard. Leaving a comment on a news aggregation service is easy.
He's simply making the point that even when your business can't capture a fraction of the total market that's worth discussing in numerical terms the numerator can still be quite noticeable. Your average small web company wouldn't mind having 100K paying users right now and they probably won't when 1M is less than 0.05% of net users. Reasoning about percentages and limits is relevant if your target user base is of the same scale as the total market or you're counting on a VC pitch based on winner takes all. It's not mandatory if all you care about is building a sustainable business: My local coffeehouse probably has a few hundred regular customers and their share of the worldwide coffee business is effectively 0%, but they're doing just fine financially.
I wast trying to understand how business thinking work. Not judge or praise it.
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