WhatsApp Stats (2014):
- 450 million active users, and reached that number faster than any other company in history.
- 50 billion messages every day across seven platforms (inbound + outbound)
- 32 engineers, one developer supports 14 million active users
- $60 million investment from Sequoia Capital
Which they managed their own FreeBSD servers hosted on SoftLayer.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...
YouTube (2008):
"YouTube grew incredibly fast, to over 100 million video views per day, with only a handful of people responsible for scaling the site"
- 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects
- 2 feature developers, 2 network engineers, 1 DBA
"They went to a colocation arrangement. Now they can customize everything and negotiate their own contracts."
"Sequoia invested a total of $11.5 million in two separate rounds and was the only venture firm to invest in the company." [3]
[2] http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html
There is a sweet spot where cloud is good and provides some benefit but, once you're serving hundreds of millions of people and have double-digit millions in investment, you can probably do significantly better cost-wise rolling your own servers. Worst case, you just throw your own hypervisor management system on them and have most of the same features you got from a cloud service. If you're smart, you can probably architect it so you have on-demand overflow capacity from a cloud provider in case there's a spike you can't account for, which is the best of both worlds.
and yeah, they were down all the time, but that didn't seem to matter to their growth.
The part of that solution which was related to making the system scalable was written by two of us, who also did other things (it involved a partionable backend storage service, and a user registration service, that combined to let us migrate users between servers to even out load and partition storage; everything else was stateless).
This idea that AWS is necessary to build to scale with small staff just does not match reality. My years of consulting also showed me that I'd earn more from clients who insisted on AWS - they typically spent far more time and resources on devops (and spent far more on hosting overall).
AWS is convenient, and it's great when you can afford it, but it's expensive and still requires substantial devops effort.
Indeed. Hopefully, soon they'll stop selling physical items in that online store they have and focus on their strengths, so that other companies, who might be able to do better at selling things that aren't so frequently counterfeit that I no longer buy anything from Amazon, can have a go.
Could you expand on this?
I can't tell if you mean to launch a service/company or if you're talking about some large scale.. thing.. I haven't heard of.
Hard to imagine that without AWS.
Sure, google and Microsoft and IBM joined the party, but AWS was first and remains the best holistically. This is their moment of domination, and eventually something will knock them down, but they have made so many companies so nimble and powerful in ways that were impossible before. Go Amazon.