Then they slowly turn into a datacenter company and lose sight of being a ride sharing company. That's the same reason billion dollar companies rent buildings instead of owning them.
Uber hosts its own infrastructure, so does Google, so does Facebook. All three of those companies have no problems remaining focused on their business models without turning into a "datacenter company."
I strongly dislike the notion that on-prem hosting is somehow a bad thing, or too cumbersome, or otherwise totally solved by cloud providers. AWS specifically is hugely convenient in a number of ways, but it doesn't come close to the cost savings from running your own infrastructure. You need a pretty large amount of capital and engineering talent, but it really is worth it even in the short term (~3-5 years).
I think people would be shocked at what the money comes out to be if they saw costs from companies doing their own physical infrastructure. AWS makes you pay through the nose, seeing the difference would change a lot of minds I'm sure.
Google have struggled to retain focus. And when they started out, they chose to compete on datacenters as a core competency: their corporate history is full of the idea that they could run a search engine cheaper/better than competitors by using commodity PCs and that kind of thing.
Facebook is a similar story: being the biggest website in the world is a core competency for them, and one of the ways they outcompeted rivals early on was by scaling their website better.
Uber has yet to turn a profit.
If datacenters are a part of your business proposition - not necessarily "we're selling datacenters to other people" but rather "we will be able to outcompete our rivals because our datacenter strategy will be better" - then self-hosting makes sense. But if the datacenter is a commodity from the point of view of your business - and I would assume that would be the case for Lyft - then it makes sense to buy off the shelf.
The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services. Sure you can run your own DBs instead of using RDS, but what if you start using their proprietary rubbish, like Knesis or DynamoDB?
You have to rewrite application to use something else that's open source and self-hostable.
For new startups, I honestly recommend using DigitalOcean or Vultur. You don't get all the AWS components, but you can build around flexibility. If you have to move, you can take all your Terraform and Anisble scripts, and port them to a new provider (and yes, you do have to rewrite your Terraform config. Every provider is insanely different and the magic of multi-cloud is a myth, but it's still easier than trying to move off of AWS specific services).
I remember back in the day, Stackoverflow ran everything off of a single, very expensive, dedicated server. I've worked at other shops where we've migrated stuff from AWS to self hosted solutions to reduce our $200k/month AWS bill.
> The trouble is when people build around Amazon, they get locked into a lot of those services.
The trouble when people build things that have nothing to do with their core value propositions, they get locked into those services too. It is very easy for companies to get locked into their own homebrew garbage frameworks, clustering solutions, reporting & data analysis apps, or whatever else people hacked up because "omg vendor lockin!!".
Seriously, I hear the same argument with frameworks too. At the end of the day it isn’t a choice between framework A and no framework, it’s going to be a framework A and your custom baked framework, and do you really have the time to spend reinventing the wheel?
Google is a bad comparison here IMO because Google IS a datacenter company. No different than Amazon... They run datacenters and offer IaaS to customers, and piggy back off of that.
The idea to use hosting is much older. Many companies offered services like that even in the 90s with AWS it really scaled up and the quality for hosting then improved across the globe.
SQL and Domain Names was very common even in the 90s. The other concepts hadn't really evolved. Even AWS only had EC2 and S3 in the beginning. I'm just trying to relate and point out that Google decided to self host, rather then depend on someone else - which for a business that exponentialy grows is the best way, even today.
How would they become a data center company? There are 1000s of huge companies using a mix of colocated DCs, their own DCs, and cloud providers like AWS including the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Most of them are not datacenter companies like QTS.
Most of these companies aren't managing their own data centers at least for areas that use a large amount of compute. Banks and the like that have their own data centers, generally are still using some type of contractor to manage the physical real estate, network connections, ect. even if they are the ones purchasing the servers.
Come on, that’s like saying Google has no business having datacenters because they are an Advertising and Search company. Of course large companies will have contractors to scale up and down. They will have FTEs doing System Administration and Software Engineering on the servers.
They could also just rent dedicated bare metal servers on a month-to-month basis, getting whatever hardware specs they want so long as it's not overly exotic. Then they don't have to worry about anything at the data centre or hardware level.
Given that cloud costs easily 6-7x for the equivalent amount of hardware resources as a well priced dedicated server provider, you can just buy 2-3x the resources you need for extra scalability and not have to share those resources with anyone. Or if you are in the tiny minority of companies that really does have extremely erratic load requirements, you can put your base load on bare metal and your excess load on cloud.
I don't understand why people on HN always put forth a false dichotomy between cloud and running your own data centre when there's a plethora of different mixes of infrastructure and managed services that falls in between.
This analogy somewhat fails given that buildings and equipment are a generally fixed cost/asset, whereas compute power, storeage, etc. are probably more of marginal costs for a technology company such as Lyft. It would suggest they also contract out most of their technology development as well.
I thought that was a tax law thing:
Real Estate Income Trusts don’t pay any tax on their distributions, and nor do you (immediately) if they’re in a tax-deferred or tax-free account.
In other words, holding real estate in a Corp that does other stuff isn’t efficient.
>That's the same reason billion dollar companies rent buildings instead of owning them.
If you've got billions then you can create your own limited liability company, poach a bit of top talent to fill it (overpay a bit if you must) and get a decent operation going. One that will jump when you say jump no matter what.
You can't replace AWS global scale, but for your rental example its definitely possible. Companies rent mostly due to tax & liability reasons from what I can tell.
> Then they slowly turn into a datacenter company and lose sight of being a ride sharing company.
That assertion makes no sense at all, particularly if we acknowledge the fact that they are in the business of providing a web service. IT infrastructure is critical to Lyft's core business.
Would it make any more sense to criticise Lyft for hiring developers because that would mean they would slowly turn into a software development company?
