Any inside stories on what twitter discovered when they benchmarked Google with other providers. I imagine they must have done a very exhaustive evaluation
I don't have any internal numbers, but imagine if Twitter could meet its needs with an N-node Redshift cluster or an N/2-node Dataproc cluster, because Dataproc is so much faster at flipping the bits or whatever Twitter wants to do (probably network performance really). Google could charge more per node and still come out cheaper because of performance.
(EDIT: The provided quote from a Twitter employee hints at this directly: "the savings")
This is a company with more petabytes of video footage in their data lake than I've seen before and GCP wanted to give them free storage for the prestige (and possible upside, longterm) of having Big Company on their list.
Quote from reply above: "Derek’s point about savings is about list price differences that result from total system performance (and not any sort of special discounting)"
>>> In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.
> Derek’s point about savings is about list price differences that result from total system performance (and not any sort of special discounting).
But if all ask for the Twitter discount, you're screwed. However, by by next year no one can compare the offerings side by side. Better machines, cheaper offerings etc.
We shared a bunch of stuff in this video: https://youtu.be/4FLFcWgZdo4
One of the interesting benchmarks was GridMix performance at scale. And overall performance for throughput-oriented workloads like Hadoop was generally strong. Most cloud benchmarking I have seen sticks to micro-benchmarks and single-node benchmarks, so they miss this.
You'd be surprised, if you are a big enough customer, even better if you are a reputable one, how much catering the cloud provider would be willing to offer.
Apparently this is a trend going back years, it doesn't seem to be doing anything good for Twitter or Square: https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/big-twitter-investor-defen...
People claiming that Twitter or Facebook has a political bias are missing the real point. For example, I think that Zuck really, truly, doesn't give a fink about political bias. How could he? He'd never get any sleep! In his position, all he cares about is the money. If that takes making this or that comment or public statement or testimony to Congress, it doesn't matter. It's all geared towards and carefully crafted towards keeping the money flowing.
In that sense, he and the top brass at a place like Facebook are all political whores, so to speak. Selling their convictions for whatever keeps the spigot open.
On a sidenote, Square, Stripe, Payment Ninja, <insert payments startup> so far seems to be lipstick on the pig that is the underlying debit/credit networks, often with a hefty price for said lipstick. The US badly needs a better version of Zelle that supports business transactions.
Not yet available in the US. Coming soon though.