[avifreedman]

Unless that's capex for building, or includes server capex that they depreciate, that seems way high given Uber's scale.

A pretty dense cabinet should only cost ~$1400/mo at wholesale (1MW+ rooms) rates, and $200M is 143,000 cabinets.

And it's public that Uber uses multiple clouds as well.

Disclaimer: I haven't reviewed public Uber filings, would be very interested if there's any data that indicates they're really spending $200M on opex for real estate (which would be equivalent to $400M/year on cloud, which is either opex or potentially mix if there is some reserved instance-type cloud spend).

[user5994461]

The 42U rack might be only $1400 per month but the servers to put inside are $5000 upfront per U.

[wongarsu]

42U times $5000 divided by 3 years is still only $5833 per month per rack. Add the $1400 and we have a total amortized rack cost of $7233 per month. (naively assuming you could fill every spot in the rack with servers).

But servers can't be included in a "Uber spends nearly 200M/yr alone on real estate for their datacenters" figure anyway.

[user5994461]

The rack is $2800 per month, not $1400. The lowest advertised pricing does not include enough power to supply half of what's in the rack.

Add $200 per server per month to have a gigabit uplink.

Add $4000 per server per lifetime for VmWare licenses.

These are reasonable estimates of course. Could be multiple of that depending on what hardware is used and what colo. Physical hardware easily gets as expensive as any cloud.

[dijit]

Not easily; you’re making the argument that there can be high expenses for collocating but you’re talking about a -lot- of computational power.

I know that hardware varies a lot for sure, but for context I put together 3 racks 50% density with an 800gbit backplane for around 18k eur/mo.

I spared no expense, official juniper QSFPs (which are egregiously overpriced) and top of the line Dell servers with full out of band licenses.

And once there: interconnected bandwidth and IOPs became “free” (or, no extra charge).

We put the same application in cloud And it costs us 40k eur/mo with a heavy amount of optimisation, with half-sized instances and an aggressive optimisation in bandwidth/iops.

Clouds “sticker price” to us is 4x that of physical. You can buy a lot of human time for that price.

[user5994461]

Physical infrastructure is always overprovisioned because it has to be planned long in advance and the smallest unit is huge (8 cores? 128 GB of RAM? for a small server).

If anything that's an argument against physical infra, not in favor of. Although it's fine if one wants a lot of the same big servers (an Hadoop cluster, or video computing cluster, or a CDN), which are the few use cases where physical can make sense (and hybrid cloud probably makes even more sense).

With AWS, you'd never spin half of that infra upfront. You'd spin a few VMs and start running stuff. If the project goes well, spin more or bigger VMs, otherwise spin down. Cost is very dynamic and the company doesn't have to spend half a million upfront, which is a big financial problem for many companies.

Anyway. We can both agree on AWS being overpriced. The reference on costs should be Google Cloud if one is cost conscious, not AWS. Google Cloud is often half the costs of AWS for the same thing.

AWS vs Google comparison, bit old and instance types have changed but relative pricing has not moved https://thehftguy.com/2018/11/13/2018-cloud-pricing-aws-now-...

And this one more recent since they've released high memory instances to compete with SoftLayer: https://thehftguy.com/2018/11/13/2018-cloud-pricing-aws-now-...

[dijit]

My costings are based on GCP; with sublime discounts even.

And, I would really agree with you if not for 2 things:

1) "wasted" cycles are not wasted, the CPU will clock down.

2) Kubernetes was designed specifically for this, the idea is you slice the CPU up so much that you dont waste much resources.

It's astonishingly capable of consuming all resources.

By the by; RAM is never "wasted", it's used for various caches.

[avifreedman]

As the others say in the comments, understand completely re: servers. And network. And some management overhead. I will write a blog post laying out our COGS at Kentik including all these factors, hope it'll wind up helpful.

[twic]

> A pretty dense cabinet should only cost ~$1400/mo at wholesale (1MW+ rooms) rates, and $200M is 143,000 cabinets.

The 200M is for a year - at $1400/mo, that's 11905 cabinets.