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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

This makes no sense. One cannot spend $33M a month on Google Cloud. (Remember that it's half the price of AWS, and given a contract of that magnitude it's possible that they negotiated yet another half off).

The amount of hardware and services one would get for that bill is insane. Snapchat doesn't need that much computing power and storage.

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I'm not so sure. $33M would buy 412PB of egress alone. At 160M daily active users, that's roughly 2GB per user. In just bandwidth. That's high, and they've probably negotiated some deals to lower their bills, but also consider instances, storage (photos and videos), 10% of their bill is easily support...

$33M a month is the right magnitude. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's actually way too low, and they're getting really deep discounts.

I was just offered 1 gigabit unmetered for $500/month in the Denver colo I run my servers in. I have to be sure, that Google gets their bandwidth for far, far less!

Which means, 50 cents per Mbps/per month. Usually a 1Mbps means about 190GB of transfer over the course of a month, I think. So 1000 * 190GB = 0.190 PB per month.

412PB thus means ~ 2200 Gbit/s . Under my pricing, I get a whole lot less than $33M / month.

So, does your calculation involve storing that same 412PB?

No. In what world would Snapchat be paying the rates that you pay at your Denver colo center? Why is that even relevant? They pay what Google charges them, which is $0.08/GB egress. Probably less due to negotiated bulk discounts.

8 cents per GB is thus approximately $15 per Mbps (8 cents time 190)that Snap is paying, while Google is paying far less than 50 cents per Mbps.

Is my math off?

Your units are off.

If I push 1 GB per month, https://www.google.com/search?q=1GB%2Fmonth+in+mbps&oq=1GB%2...

You can assume they are not paying list rate when they buy $400M of service.

If they push ~40gbps on average, that's 13PB - https://www.google.com/search?q=40gbps+*+30+days+in+PB&oq=40...

13PB is 13M GB. 13M GB @ .08/GB = $1.04M

$1.04M/40gbps = 1.04M/40000 = $26/Mbps.

I pay less than a 10th of that outside.

You colo bandwidth is likely not from a global CDN with hundreds of PoP: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

Bandwidth is bandwidth these days. Plenty of companies like Internap are out there that can help you with low latency bandwidth, especially when you are spending a lot.

But given that Snap could be anywhere in the USA, they could locate their servers anywhere. I wasn't pushing Denver, or the colo I am in, as the solution.

It's just kind of shocking that people are willing to pay 20 times or more the going rate for bandwidth...

I guess that speaks about the scale at which they are operating in Google Cloud. Diane Green mentioned in a recent conference that one of their healthcare customers collect about 2 PB / user. Lot of companies struggle with managing / extracting value from data. Thats where the bottle neck is usually. If they have capability to handle more data, overtime their services evolve to collect, store and process more data. Once Big Data became reality, many companies started collecting orders of magnitude more data. With Google Cloud its easy to handle petabytes of data. That enables large scale computing companies on Google Cloud. (Think of driverless cars / genomics / large scale machine learning / social networks / ... )

That seems a bit too much storage, considering that Seagate only shipped around ~ 250 Exabytes worth of HDD in 2015[1]. Being extremely generous for world supply of Hard drive, we might have had only 1000 Exabytes of storage shipped in a year.

Assuming 2 Petabyte per user, mere 500,000 user will consume entire storage produced every year. May be they do, but 2 PB/user seems improbable. That's also $14k per person of data (assuming no discount from Google to this company).

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10098/market-views-2015-hard-d...

Lets not assume that Google buys storage from Seagate. Google makes its own hardware for many things (networking, TensorFlow custom ASIC). Also I don't think that have that many number of customers.

Google does not manufacture hard drives, they do buy them from the typical storage companies.

By "user", you mean an entire company that houses data on thousands or perhaps millions of patients, right?

Nop. By user I mean per person, not company. Now take a deep breath and think about the scale of Google Cloud.

Wow. What takes that much storage per user? Genome sequencing?

Yes (+ associated analysis).

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/08/stanford-medi... or https://www.broadinstitute.org/google

Healthcare? Hmmmm, NSA, now that I can believe as they could actually afford it.

I don't know.

Maybe $400M/year unlocks Google customer support?

Its the support level where APIs you use are no longer randomly deprecated

Hi!

Terrance from Google Cloud Platform Support here. If you are having any issues interacting with our support team please drop me a line with some case numbers (tsg@google.com) and I will take a look and try and resolve them.

The support is ~ 10% of the bill, just like AWS.

Best comment ever

Funny 'cause it's true. :)

Yeah, that seems really high. $400m a year? They're 10% of Google's yearly cloud revenue on their own? That said it's definitely what the s-1 filing claims: "Any transition of the cloud services currently provided by Google Cloud to another cloud provider would be difficult to implement and will cause us to incur significant time and expense. We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years and have built our software and computer systems to use computing, storage capabilities, bandwidth, and other services provided by Google, some of which do not have an alternative in the market."

Where do you get that 10% from?

From the article...

"Google doesn’t break out revenues from its cloud infrastructure, choosing to lump it in with other non-advertising businesses like hardware and Google Play sales. But that segment totaled $3.4 billion in sales in the most recent quarter."

Assuming that all $3.4 billion is for cloud revenue last quarter, that is still less than 10% for last quarter ($400m/4 = $100m).

Hmm, might have been looking at q4 2015 which looked like 800 million a quarter. Still, a significant share either way yeah?

At one time, snap was heavily appengine, which is of course a higher priced offering than bare instances.

As someone who works for a billion dollar tech company moving to aws, I totally believe that level of spending.

You should move to GCP -- you'll spend less! :D

Yes, I wonder if they're over-engineering things. I've seen MongoDB, Cassandra, and MySQL, all 3 used simultaneously, for example (until a more sensible CTO came along and consolidated everything into one database).

Maybe Snap is also including the engineering effort on its end required to maintain the Google stack in the $2B?

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