116 karma · joined May 18, 2015
My experience is that I use my Instagram account not to interact with my social group but to engage with content I like (primarily art content like sculpture, painting, light/projection, music, etc). It's actually a really pleasant experience and I'm doing my best to protect my groove in the recommendation algorithm. I basically get an effortless feed of art events in my area without me needing to subscribe to a newsletter. And it also engages me with a lot of independent artists selling unique items that I like.
We may have different definitions of "rich" here. I don't think you can call them the most productive citizens. I think most extractive would be the more accurate label.
And the stimulus checks were short lived, not universally distributed, and came in under $1T. The majority of the money spent was on other sources, even if you want to include the boosts to unemployment in the "UBI" category. As others mentioned it's also conflated with other factors like supply chain failures and massive business loan fraud.
They need to use an asynchronous system to be tracking when your chat becomes "finished" and then likely queue it up to a system looking to propagate deletes. They have to choose some kind of SLA on that and probably went with a common data privacy user data deletion window of 30 days.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34551290
As for the call sampling/interception, that did not factor into discovering the high cost buckets in the logging case study. It was mostly relevant to generally describing how we track costs and it ends up being useful in other scenarios. For example it could be used to assess the estimated unit economics of customers subscribed into a specific product tier.
We also have the death star microservice model, so even relatively simple attribution can be helpful when you want to run a query like “for my team which owns 30 applications, tell me the monthly attributed cost grouped by resource” and that will be able to return all the associated database and cloud costs.
I would have to read more into how it intercepts some of our database calls to confirm if it tries to weight for execution time where it wires into database client code, which is probably useful and could help to a degree to approximate utilization.
I think in practice it’s a bit uncommon for the heaviest user to also be a sparse user in terms of volume. But I can also admit there are quirks to how it samples and I once personally spent a couple days tracking down a surprising cost of an application I owned only to later confirm it was a data flaw in how we were doing this sampled attribution (in this case the heaviest users were un-instrumented infra processes that can’t just wire in our java cost attribution library, making it artificially look like my app was the heaviest user).
At 20% of storage costs, the should makes a lot of sense to focus on. Once it becomes 1% of storage costs it’s maybe not as problematic though. The magnitude to which, “let’s compress the logs” changes how much something like “am I logging too much” matters is important. Taking it to the absurd, if logging storage were free why not retain all logs. And if logging is cheap, why invest in complicated guardrails for what qualifies as important logs.
A specific consideration for us is organizational inertia. We have a lot of teams using infrastructure in a lot of ways both intended and unintended. One thing, for better or worse, that has been emphasized for us is developer velocity. Which includes things like abstracting “do I need to log this” from most engineers. We have some guardrails to alert if you do some egregious volume.
I think we do often opt for non-invasive infra solutions first because they have much shorter delivery times and less risk of stalling on long-tail outliers. They avoid very expensive organizational costs of buy in and team-level migration. I’m not suggesting this is the best organizational model, but it also transcends one team’s influence.
That ends up circling back around to the start of the problem. If we can transparently reduce the cost burden of some heavily-used internal infrastructure within the same relative magnitude of applying a paradigm shift on the usage of the same internal infrastructure, the former wins out.
I reckon you may be looking at the monthly cost of storage per gigabyte which is why the number doesn’t seem to make sense. Our retention policy started off at about 2 years, so the remaining lifetime per file amortizes out to much more than 1 month.
Also worth considering that we have a custom AWS contract, so none of our actual numbers are the publicly advertised rates and probably won’t entirely math out if you try to ballpark with those numbers.
The post fails to mention this system is also tracking internal data dimensions like customer ids, such that we can also use this sampled data to estimate the cost of customers (and joining that with tiers of customers, and so forth).
I'm also not sure if that would allow us to attribute the cost of our datastore utilizations since those are not AWS-hosted versions but ones we run ourselves. The traffic interception lets us be able to say that Application A is using 75% of database cluster XYZ, and therefore that application/product group are most likely responsible for that share of how much the database costs.
The last thing I'll mention is that CloudTrail has the potential to be expensive on its own, I believe at least moreso than us storing the raw data in S3 for something like Athena to read. I don't think I'll be writing about it, but we've also done work this last year to trim down what we track in CloudTrail due to the cost of events (for example tracking everything in S3 ends up being pretty expensive).
Low prices & low interest rates: great for new entries to homeownership, but would require a surplus of housing Low prices & high interest rates: great for those who buy property with cash (wealthy people and corporations) High prices & low interest rates: great for existing owners High prices & high interest rates: generally bad for everyone except those able to offload existing housing thy own
I'm not in the child age group, but I've made friends this way as a 31 year old.
Both of those are highly representative of the demographic that want to discuss such things on reddit. Others are often even moderated against from some of what I've seen and thus discouraged from discussion. I don't know about that specific sub-reddit, but it certainly happens in some. It's an important echo chamber for exuberant hype so people have a vested interest in protecting that in the mostly unregulated market.