[spyspy]

Is it just me or is every big release from Uber just a custom rewrite of an existing technology? It seems their engineering department has a large not-invented-here attitude. I could be wrong - they're certainly large enough to have custom requirements that aren't met with what's on the market but the pattern is just becoming suspect.

[warp_factor]

I think you are right.

I think that what is going there is also a bit political. They started to grow their Engineering department so fast that they need to justify the headcounts now. So each team is trying to invent new projects all the time. Anecdotally, this was partially confirmed to me by a friend working there.

I said this before, but I still cannot understand why a service like Uber need so many engineers in the backend (multiple thousands). It is a complex distributed application, but nowhere near the scale or complexity of a Facebook or Google.

[theon144]

>I said this before, but I still cannot understand why a service like Uber need so many engineers in the backend (multiple thousands). It is a complex distributed application, but nowhere near the scale or complexity of a Facebook or Google.

Thank you so much, I thought I was going crazy. I understand the demands of running a service on the level Uber has, but well, for instance I can't imagine what kind of computational workload / infrastructure requirements would make developing your own resource scheduler a reasonable option - for a Taxi app? With non-essential (to the core product) machine learning?

Forgive me if I'm ignorant, but what exactly does Uber engineering team do?

edit: On their blog I was able to find that they namely "forecast rider demand", from a relatively small [0] article - that is, comapred to the article [1] about what essentially is "just" data visualization, which doesn't help my confusion much.

0 - https://eng.uber.com/neural-networks/ 1 - https://eng.uber.com/maze/

[jvanderbot]

Those cars generate a lot of sensor data. (Tb per drive?). Id imagine that data needs to be made actionable and seperated into training and simulation sets pretty quickly. Mapping is a massive problem to automate.

[theon144]

Oh right, the self-driving cars. Well that's starting to make sense now.

[notyourday]

Makes it possible for me to get a ride, process payments and refunds even when the data centers are having issues or when there are temporary internet problems.

What does the facebook engineering team do?

[losteric]

Sure but that doesn't require thousands of backend engineers unless they are reinventing everything... and I'd be left wondering what they are rebuilding since, over the past year, every one of my trips with Uber has been a bar-lowering experience...

[rtpg]

To be fair, operations becomes a much bigger deal as you get bigger. It’s not just the app, it’s having your infrastructure not fall over (because 0.1% failure rate means losing a lot of money)

Think of all the random bugs you’ve seen in your job and told yourself “eh, this would take someone 2 weeks to fix and is almost never hit by customers”

[warp_factor]

I think one of the bigger challenge is that when you become bigger you launch more projects to handle the scale and each of those projects introduce new bugs for which you need new team of engineers.

Basically, once you hit scaling I think you end up with a super small team that managed to keep simple (instagram for example) or you end up with a huge team that explodes in complexity and needs to grow exponentially to handle all the extra complexity. Uber is very obviously in the later bucket.

[notyourday]

I periodically see the same content on my FB feed because well, it is NBD if I see the same update from my friend several times.

Let me assure you, it is a BFD if I get billed twice for the same trip. So I am pretty sure Uber needs quite a few engineers to make sure that their stuff works correctly every time in every market for every customer.

[jrockway]

I appreciate their efforts on open-source projects. Jaeger is wonderful and the effort they put into both making something great, and supporting the open standards (Opentracing and the legacy Zipkin propagation) is greatly appreciated. I recently had the need to write a service in Typescript (most everything else is Go), and I felt very at home using the Jaeger node bindings. It felt like I wasn't losing any features for using a less-popular language and everything just worked.

Sure, they just reinvented Dapper from Google... but unlike Dapper I can download and use Jaeger. That counts for a lot. Do I use their ride sharing service? Nope. But I do like their open source projects.

[chillacy]

Maybe not at the same scale but imo their core system has a lot of tech challenges:

* Lots of realtime

* Resource scheduling problems

* Route optimization problems (especially with shared uber or shared lyft rides)

[warp_factor]

ok, but:

* Everything they do is low data (no video, image or anything high bandwith).

* Their whole model can be subdivided into smaller local problems (all users//drivers in the bay area have nothing to do with the users//drivers currently in NYC).

yes there is a couple of algorithms to develop for Uber Pool, and for the real time matching but everything else looks like a fairly simple app backend to me.

[nemothekid]

> Everything they do is low data (no video, image or anything high bandwith).*

So is everyone else? Storage and CDN isn't nearly as complex as ad serving on Facebook (Which is like Uber's matching - it's a realtime marketplace). Ad serving takes up relatively little bits.

[chillacy]

I'm not a network engineer so I'm unfamiliar with how problems scale by bandwidth. I do know that solving NP hard problems is difficult, so I respect Uber engineers for that at least.

[raghava]

> need to justify the headcounts

Something similar happened in LinkedIn too I guess. Multiple teams building very similar tools that were on very related problems.

[throwawaymath]

I wouldn't say this is a rewrite of existing technology. They borrowed concepts from other well-known open source projects, but this is substantially a wrapper around Mesos, not a competing project. The technical overview of Peloton[1] is more clear about this than the open source announcement, which is what's featured here.

_________________

1. https://eng.uber.com/peloton/

[sciurus]

Thanks for sharing! That is definitely a better link than the one posted.

[pj_mukh]

Anyone who had to take an Uber after they switched away from Google Maps and onto their in-house half-baked mapping/navigation solution knows this is a huge problem.

I'm assuming like all mapping solutions it'll get better but for now, it's just full of bad routes, over-optimizing turns, out-of-date detours (for MONTHS!) and non-sensical U-turns

[0xDEFC0DE]

Not to defend Uber/NIH syndrome, but if Google wanted to specifically charge Uber more for maps because of usage, could they legally do that?

Maybe the rewrites are risk management?

[Nextgrid]

They could just use a third-party (and at their scale, they can definitely negotiate a custom deal where they feed back usage data to improve the third-party’s service) or even use open source solutions like OpenStreetMaps. Even the latter (with the overhead of hosting it themselves) makes total sense at their scale.

[0xDEFC0DE]

That'd be in a contract though, so what if Google decided to not renew and only let Uber know like a month before the contract ended?

If these questions seem dumb it's because I know pretty little about legal battles in software.

[tomnipotent]

I'd wager this contract has a 90+ day termination notification requirement at a minimum.

[giancarlostoro]

Google increased maps cost for everybody though, not just Uber.

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/features/google-maps-apis-new-...

[0xDEFC0DE]

I'm asking whether only Uber could be charged more.

[anitil]

You've hit the nail on the head. Uber can't risk being one management decision from Google away from shutting down.

[baroffoos]

They are already forced to be like that by being in the app store.

[jen20]

Were they not recently embroiled in a lawsuit, too?

[malandrew]

The problem with a comment like this is that it only takes into account when something was released publicly and not when the problem was first worked on and implemented internally.

Many internal projects that eventually become open-source often are not NIH projects because when the project was proposed their may have been no public open source projects or at least none that is mature enough. Even if something exists but it still in its early stages, it presents a lot of risk because your company isn't in the driver seat building and maintaining it.

Claiming something is NIH based on when it first became polished enough to be open-source ignores all the history behind the state of the world when a project was first worked on.

[mindcrime]

Is it just me or is every big release from Uber just a custom rewrite of an existing technology?

I'm a little sad that this is the top comment here. I mean, maybe you're right. But so what? Some people find this useful, and some won't. Same as anything else.

At the end of the day, every line of code added to the world's pool of OSS code is a Good Thing™ as far as I'm concerned. Even if it's something I personally don't have a use for.

I think we should encourage companies to release code as open source, and give Uber at least some small measure of "props" for the stuff they release. Maybe none of their stuff is a game changer like Linux, but it doesn't need to be.

[ummonk]

Their urban gps locating technology based off satellite masking is pretty unique as far as I know.

[jjoonathan]

Does anyone know an open source Uber Michelangelo?

[eggie5]

there's pipeline.ai, airbnb said they'd open source theirs this year and also, TFX suite is getting there. Platforms are becoming popular