What is Snapchat spending $400M in hosting costs on?
The $400 million is just for Google Cloud and doesn't include salaries or anything else. It's also their biggest expense by far, nearly half of their budget.
I just don't get what they could spend $400 million per year on for hosting. That's $33 million per month. What components do they use?
- Basic database tasks (users, friends, postings, etc.)
- Storage of photos and videos
- Bandwidth of photos and videos
- Maybe some computing for resizing photos and videos (one time per each)
- A little bit of big data processing for advertising targeting
Database is cheap, especially with caching. Storage is dirt cheap, especially since everything gets deleted within a few days. Outbound bandwidth at Google Cloud's standard pricing is around $100K per petabyte, inbound bandwidth is free. Google Cloud CDN adds another $20K per petabyte. And those are standard prices, which Snapchat is getting a steep discount on (source: common sense + they mention that in the filings).
I'm pretty sure the face detection for filters is done locally on the user's device (since it appears in realtime). Combining the filter with the raw video is probably also done locally, or could be. Pretty much all processing like filtering or sorting postings could be done locally; it's not like some web apps where you have to use app or web servers to do a bunch of pre-processing of the data.
Yeah, I'm just at a loss as to what they could be spending that much money on. Thoughts?