[nikcub]

There is nothing about using cloud services that makes this a unique risk factor. With self-hosting replace "Google" with the companies own name and list all the things that can go wrong - it's pretty standard for a tech co. S1.

For ex. this is Twitter's risk item for running hosted services:

> Our business and operating results may be harmed by a disruption in our service, or by our failure to timely and effectively scale and adapt our existing technology and infrastructure

Continues bottom of page 26[0]

[0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...

[late2part]

So outsource the risk so you can blame someone else? Maybe....

[Klathmon]

Outsource the risk to someone who has an entire product devoted to that one area, and has many years of experience and is probably the largest provider on the planet for that service...

[late2part]

On the one hand - you're right. Google is good, I use GCP, they are competent and good to work with.

On the other hand "someone who has an entire product devoted to that one area, and has many years of experience and is probably the largest provider on the planet for that service" also describes Enron at the time.

Google's no Enron, but Size isn't the metric one should use.

[Klathmon]

But even taking Enron into account, A Taxi company would be stupid to try to drill and refine their own gas, even right before Enron went down.

Sometimes it's just better to pay someone else to do a job.

I agree that too often "put it in the cloud" is abused, but there are areas where it really shines, and looking at their filings it looks to me like Snap has done their homework and that it's going to be a good fit for them.

They are signing on with one of the biggest, they are building out their own infrastructure over time, they are signing up with a secondary provider just in case, and they lay out their reasoning pretty well for why they want this to be handled by someone who has magnitudes more experience at it than they do (the big one being that they point out their demographic is VERY fickle, and any kind of performance issues, outages, or major problems could easily be the thing that switches someone to an alternate service forever. And they themselves don't quite have a grasp on expected growth so going somewhere that you can scale at a moments notice is a great benefit!)

[lallysingh]

Parent listed 3 metrics. I don't think it's fair to pull one out and attack that instead of the combination of all 3.

[late2part]

you are right but i meant to imply enron was all three, but i didnt write that.