Snapchat runs entirely on Google Cloud Platform, and have famously declared that they have 0 Ops people because everything they use is fully-managed and no-ops. This is one of the reasons they are able to deliver features at such a rapid pace - they aren't worried about scale or reliability the way anyone at the scale is on-premise or on AWS/Azure.
There is no such thing as no ops. Only someone else doing ops, no more than I can have TensorFlow write code instead of developers.
Some folks discuss this more elegantly - http://www.cloudtp.com/2016/01/21/dont-let-vendor-lock-in-fe...
You make a good point on No-Ops vs Ops. I think it's a gradient. I also think that Snapchat is on the far far left (on No-Ops edge) against virtually any other large-scale technology company in the world, Google included (singe Google is Snapchat's Ops largely), largely because of the nature of Google AppEngine.
Can you expand on this? How/why would anyone developing a potentially high-traffic app have to worry if they are e.g. leveraging AWS fully? How does that compare to google cloud?
You can certainly replicate their scale on AWS/Azure.. or Google Compute Engine for that matter.. but you'd need to do a whole lot of non-trivial work around scalability, durability, etc etc. Snapchat runs light on this front, allowing them to focus on launching features rather than keeping the lights on. No one even remotely close to Snapchat in scale runs as lean as they do, and that luxury is afforded largely by Google AppEngine.
Let's be very clear here. It's afforded largely by Google AppEngine and lots of cash.
It takes minimal effort to scale infrastructure these days, which is fantastic.
It also reinforces that there is nothing special about snapchat besides its user base, which is mirrored on half a dozen other social networks.