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Comment by lunchables | Hacker News Reader

I guess what bothers me the most about the original tweet(s) is the false dichotomy of "build your own datacenter" or "use AWS". How about co-locating at one of the many, many Tier 3 certified datacenters all over the world? There are tons of providers with locations all over the country and world. Or beyond that, what about letting someone else (e.g. Compass Data Centers) build a datacenter for you?

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Very true. For example, we're running most of our log aggregation and time series handling on rented dedicated servers. It took more work and skill to get to work compared to something like AWS elasticsearch, but the setup is dirt-cheap for what it does including redundancy in case of hardware failures. Or, my last employer used to run a lot of their data warehousing and BI on rented physical systems for similar reasons - high IO demand, built-in redundancy.

There are many steps you can take before buying concrete to build a DC. Even before you have to buy your own rack.

What do you use for your log aggregation and time series?

We run a fairly classical elastic stack for our log aggregation and telegraf/influxdb for time series. And grafana/kibana pulling it all together.

Thank you, that was my point exactly. There are lots of options between "do nothing" (AWS) and "do everything" (literally build datacenters).

So use a bunch of tier 3 providers. Who is going to coordinate all of this? With AWS you have one company to call.

The guy you pay with the millions of dollars saved.

And to build a ride sharing company. First Lyft should have built an expertise in infrastructure? Should they also learn how to build cars to because it might save them money in the long run?

i ve asked this before. Lyft doesnt own cars, drivers , servers, and it even outsources its software. what is lyft's expertise?

how are they outsourcing software?

my bad . it should be support instead of software

You don't need an expert when you're starting out.

But, uh, wasn't this about their current expenses? Or their expenses at some point after their AWS bill got bigger than 1-2 employees?

And thinking likes this can kill a company.

And even with current expenses, building out a core competency in infrastructure that has nothing to do with your domain of expertise can be a distraction.

A distraction to who? You're not supposed to take people away from your core product to do this.

If you can't find anyone to even handle the hiring, let me stay far away from this company that teeters the verge of collapse when someone gets sick.

reductio ad absurdum, lyft is a taxi dispatch company, outsource mobile and web app, customer service to off shore, drivers/cars err never mind, analytics outsource to hortonworks cloudera ml consultancy . Done none of those are core

I have no idea if that’s how they operate or not or if you’re being facetious, but that’s a very valid business model. I know companies that did something similar starting out and then brought the expertise in house.

In fact, I was offered a job as a “digital transformation consultant”/“enterprise architect” to be the face of a company that did just that - take over a complete project for funded startups or other companies who had an idea but no in house expertise. Of course I would be the face of the company where most of the work would be “rural sourced” and outsourced.

> Should they also learn how to build cars to because it might save them money in the long run?

Uber's doing that and they're a comparable company.

And how is that working out for their bottom line?

I think you can make that argument when you're just starting out. But when you're an established company at Lyft's size... yeah, you can have some expertise in infrastructure.

Lyft was 4x smaller 2 years ago ....

It might make some sense for Lyft to wait for their scale to stabilise so that they don't waste money investing in infrastructure that is at the wrong scale.

> First Lyft should have built an expertise in infrastructure?

The alternative being that they should have build an expertise in using AWS instead?

I'm not particularly trying to argue either way; I'm just saying that claiming that using AWS doesn't need expertise is a false premise. AWS isn't special here, either.

If instead you use some sort of abstraction and/or tooling, now you need expertise in that tooling.

You only need a few people on prem with AWS expertise. You would be surprised how much infrastructure and management grunt work you can outsource to cheaper managed service providers who can then outsource some of their grunt work overseas.

how do you explain why Uber invested tons of money for automatous driving technology?

Because they were convinced VCs it was a good idea? But a company losing billions of dollars a year is not exactly a great model for sound business practices....

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