AWS is the opposite of homebrew. Lyft has no business maintaining its own data centers and operational overhead. There is a huge opportunity cost involved with running your own infrastructure. AWS and the like free your own teams from worrying about how to provision new systems, upgrading DB server versions, etc. Running your own data center is hard.

Running your own DC is the same as building your own chat app. It is almost always more expensive and almost all the people who claim they can do it cheaper inhouse aren't factoring in all the costs--both costs that are easy to measure and those that are almost impossible to measure

Examples of hard-to-quantify costs for running your own infrastructure include:

- What is the cost to the company of being three versions behind on mongo because IT doesn't have the bandwidth to upgrade? How many work-arounds do teams have to do because they couldn't use the latest features of mongo?

- What is the cost to the company when developers cannot quickly spin up new environments like they could using a service like heroku?

- How much innovation and new business (read $$$$) is not happening because the in-house IT simply doesn't have the toolset so a dev can quickly riff on an idea?

- How many engineers have good ideas and don't bother building them because spinning up an environment is too much trouble?

I'd argue by not using AWS you are holding your product teams back and stifle innovation. Unless of course you want to waste company money to build out your own half-assed provisioning tools that are lousy knock-offs of AWS's tools. But then, you might as well just use AWS...

I should have been more clear. AWS is absolutely the right choice.

What I was trying to point out is someone engineered a system that costs 8M/mo to run yet only handles 1M rides per day.

So they're paying 26 cents per ride on all compute resources across their entire company?

That doesn't really sound that bad, considering that rides can easily cost dozens of dollars. Just about any other non-tech business would kill for such low overhead.

> 26 cents per ride That's terrible.

Other non-tech businesses, hell EVERY business that I've ever worked in that used AWS did better per transaction - healthcare, digital advertising, virtual office tooling, gaming. If you can't do better than a credit card processing fee per paid customer interaction across the company on AWS, you might as well be selling retail goods...and depending on age, your company might be soon.

Even if it is terrible, is the business such than a 26 cent overhead on rides is going to make or break it?

Companies like Lyft are doing a lot more than updating a few fields for each ride. They would be processing massive amounts of location data and they are building out models to eventually use for self driving cars.

Thank you, my point exactly. Their infrastructure costs are terrible. Especially considering how easy their data is to shard etc (buyer and seller belong are in the same geo physically).

I don't see the analogy here. This is Lyft's core business. Of course they'll go all in. On the other hand chat is not Uber's core business. They didn't have to reinvent the wheel for an internal tool.

Is 8M/mo they outrageous a number here? Assuming Lyft paying 200k/year on average to its employees, 8M is about hiring 500 of them.

It is sizable, not ridiculous. And optimizing your cloud cost is definitely your own responsibility and deserves every bit of attention.

Running your own data center is at one extreme. Most companies lease space in a datacenter, and all of the overhead of running the data center is on a different company. You'd have an infrastructure team racking and stacking, and supporting the deployments.

What? You are crazy. At a certain scale, it is cheaper to run your own DC. But that scale is reached by a very limited few.

But past a certain point AWS is very expensive compared to renting a rack in a couple of DC's