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.
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.
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.
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 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!!".
I agree with you on Uber and Facebook though.
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 is a little tongue in cheek, but: Lyft is an abstraction. It doesn't own anything or have any customers because it's a market maker.
Lyft is an efficiency mechanism for maximizing liquidity and minimizing bid-ask spreads in hyperlocal ride trading :)
In other words, holding real estate in a Corp that does other stuff isn’t efficient.
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.
That didn't turn out very bad for amazon
And frankly i 'd rather invest in a cloud company than a money-losing taxi 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?
Article says it takes 20 people to run. GM hasnt turned into a datacenter company...
Is a century old car manufacturer in Detroit able to do what a startup in Silicone Valley can't?
Interestingly enough, GM owns 7.8% of Lyft.