Who "goes to the clouds": Western IT startups that use virtual infrastructure
It is predicted that by 2020 the volume of the cloud computing market will reach $ 121 billion. By that time, 80% of US small businesses will switch to a virtual infrastructure. Already, there is a tendency to migrate startups to IaaS.
Andrew Chen (Andrew Chen), an investor and consultant for such technology projects as Dropbox, Product Hunt and Tinder, suggested that startups are cheaper to build than to scale - the costs for employees and marketing are growing.
However, the cost of virtual infrastructure only becomes cheaper . In an attempt to attract companies from among the "unicorns", providers reduce the cost of services for them.
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What major foreign startups have already switched to virtual infrastructure? Why was it profitable for them? Understand below.
/ photo jahiro97430 CC
Earlier this year, the company that manages the instant messenger service Snapchat, signed an agreement with Google. Under the terms of the deal, Snap is committed to spending at least $ 400 million a year for five years on Google’s cloud services.
Snapchat uses virtual infrastructure for most of its operations : data storage and management, analysis and security. On the eve of the IPO Snap, it also became aware of a similar deal of the company with Amazon worth $ 1 billion.
Thus, over the next five years, Snapchat will spend $ 3 billion to launch and maintain its services in the cloud.
/ photo by Marco Verch CC
A year earlier, Netflix completed its long migration to Amazon’s virtual infrastructure. From 2016, all important processes - from managing streaming video to behavioral analytics and employee and customer data management - occur in the cloud. Netflix decided to reduce the number of its own data centers with a more active transition to leased capacity. In addition, the service develops CDN Open Connect .
In 2016, after seven years of its existence, Uber also decided to switch to cloud infrastructure. The main functions of the application form a single service ordering a taxi in a virtual environment. Uber has not yet made a choice in favor of this or that supplier, so the main market players are fighting for the maintenance of the company, which is present in 70 countries of the world.
According to Mike Curtis (Mike Curtis), vice president of technology at Airbnb, their service for accommodation and short-term rental housing since its inception has been working on a virtual infrastructure. In 2008, a young startup chose a cloud instead of its own equipment, and today not a single member of the Airbnb technical team spends time servicing corporate servers.
In early 2016, Google announced its move to the virtual infrastructure of the streaming service Spotify. Up to this point, he rented space in data centers or acquired server and network equipment to be closer to his customers.
Another streaming service - Hulu - this year transferred its key services and applications to the AWS infrastructure. Through the cloud, Hulu broadcasts its video content in a Live TV format.
In most of these examples, one way or another, the decision on migration is associated with growth problems. As noted by Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit, at the early stage of a startup’s life, a virtual infrastructure is a reasonable solution. While the amount of permanent computing resources for service maintenance is unknown, it is difficult to predict the load drops. The cloud leaves the possibility of scaling.
For example, at the time of the final transition from Netflix to AWS, the service had eight times more clients than in 2008 when the migration began. The company has attracted 75 million subscribers from 130 countries, the application is constantly changing, more and more functions are being added, and the volume of data is growing. According to Netflix, vice president of cloud solutions development, Yury Izrailevsky, supporting such rapid growth of the service would be extremely difficult based on its own data centers.
Turning to the IaaS provider, Uber thinks first of all about geographic expansion and resiliency. For example, Uber traditionally used a hybrid cloud model to avoid problems with accessibility for users - if one data center fails, it is “insured” by the data center from another city. Now the company is ready to transfer the authority to the IaaS provider and diversify the load on its servers.
In the case of Hulu, the choice of the provider freed the company from the need to create its own data centers, and the Live TV product was able to quickly enter the market and become accessible to a larger audience. IaaS provides all the requirements for streaming video, the availability of which is just as important as the timely taxi call in the case of Uber.
Mike Curtis explains why Airbnb works in a public cloud with a desire to concentrate all efforts on solving problems unique to a startup. A technical team can develop new products instead of maintaining servers. The advantage of Airbnb is that the company immediately began working in the cloud, so that it did not need to migrate further.
Npole Harteau, vice president of infrastructure solutions at Spotify, said that the decision to switch to Google’s clouds was made because of the tools for working with data. Spotify offers personalized playlists for millions of people around the world. According to Google, “the migration to virtual infrastructure allowed the company to update the technology stack, replacing Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive and a number of custom tools for data collection with more modern and efficient counterparts” - namely, Google designs.
So, Western companies, moving to the "cloud", choose flexibility, accessibility and the ability to fully focus on their own developments.
Reducing costs for them is rather a pleasant side effect.
And what about Russia? What guides domestic startups that have (for now) a little less opportunity than Netflix? We will tell in our next material.
PS Here are some more posts from our corporate blog:
Andrew Chen (Andrew Chen), an investor and consultant for such technology projects as Dropbox, Product Hunt and Tinder, suggested that startups are cheaper to build than to scale - the costs for employees and marketing are growing.
However, the cost of virtual infrastructure only becomes cheaper . In an attempt to attract companies from among the "unicorns", providers reduce the cost of services for them.
')
What major foreign startups have already switched to virtual infrastructure? Why was it profitable for them? Understand below.
/ photo jahiro97430 CC
Who chooses the virtual infrastructure
Earlier this year, the company that manages the instant messenger service Snapchat, signed an agreement with Google. Under the terms of the deal, Snap is committed to spending at least $ 400 million a year for five years on Google’s cloud services.
Snapchat uses virtual infrastructure for most of its operations : data storage and management, analysis and security. On the eve of the IPO Snap, it also became aware of a similar deal of the company with Amazon worth $ 1 billion.
Thus, over the next five years, Snapchat will spend $ 3 billion to launch and maintain its services in the cloud.
/ photo by Marco Verch CC
A year earlier, Netflix completed its long migration to Amazon’s virtual infrastructure. From 2016, all important processes - from managing streaming video to behavioral analytics and employee and customer data management - occur in the cloud. Netflix decided to reduce the number of its own data centers with a more active transition to leased capacity. In addition, the service develops CDN Open Connect .
In 2016, after seven years of its existence, Uber also decided to switch to cloud infrastructure. The main functions of the application form a single service ordering a taxi in a virtual environment. Uber has not yet made a choice in favor of this or that supplier, so the main market players are fighting for the maintenance of the company, which is present in 70 countries of the world.
According to Mike Curtis (Mike Curtis), vice president of technology at Airbnb, their service for accommodation and short-term rental housing since its inception has been working on a virtual infrastructure. In 2008, a young startup chose a cloud instead of its own equipment, and today not a single member of the Airbnb technical team spends time servicing corporate servers.
In early 2016, Google announced its move to the virtual infrastructure of the streaming service Spotify. Up to this point, he rented space in data centers or acquired server and network equipment to be closer to his customers.
Another streaming service - Hulu - this year transferred its key services and applications to the AWS infrastructure. Through the cloud, Hulu broadcasts its video content in a Live TV format.
Why projects choose IaaS
1. Flexibility
In most of these examples, one way or another, the decision on migration is associated with growth problems. As noted by Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit, at the early stage of a startup’s life, a virtual infrastructure is a reasonable solution. While the amount of permanent computing resources for service maintenance is unknown, it is difficult to predict the load drops. The cloud leaves the possibility of scaling.
For example, at the time of the final transition from Netflix to AWS, the service had eight times more clients than in 2008 when the migration began. The company has attracted 75 million subscribers from 130 countries, the application is constantly changing, more and more functions are being added, and the volume of data is growing. According to Netflix, vice president of cloud solutions development, Yury Izrailevsky, supporting such rapid growth of the service would be extremely difficult based on its own data centers.
"The flexibility of the cloud allows us to add thousands of virtual servers and petabytes of memory within a few minutes, which makes such an expansion possible," said Izrailevsky.The transition to the cloud also allowed the company to reduce costs, but Yuri sees this as a side positive effect. Willingness to scale has become a major accomplishment of Netflix.
2. Availability
Turning to the IaaS provider, Uber thinks first of all about geographic expansion and resiliency. For example, Uber traditionally used a hybrid cloud model to avoid problems with accessibility for users - if one data center fails, it is “insured” by the data center from another city. Now the company is ready to transfer the authority to the IaaS provider and diversify the load on its servers.
In the case of Hulu, the choice of the provider freed the company from the need to create its own data centers, and the Live TV product was able to quickly enter the market and become accessible to a larger audience. IaaS provides all the requirements for streaming video, the availability of which is just as important as the timely taxi call in the case of Uber.
3. Release of resources
Mike Curtis explains why Airbnb works in a public cloud with a desire to concentrate all efforts on solving problems unique to a startup. A technical team can develop new products instead of maintaining servers. The advantage of Airbnb is that the company immediately began working in the cloud, so that it did not need to migrate further.
4. Work with data
Npole Harteau, vice president of infrastructure solutions at Spotify, said that the decision to switch to Google’s clouds was made because of the tools for working with data. Spotify offers personalized playlists for millions of people around the world. According to Google, “the migration to virtual infrastructure allowed the company to update the technology stack, replacing Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive and a number of custom tools for data collection with more modern and efficient counterparts” - namely, Google designs.
So, Western companies, moving to the "cloud", choose flexibility, accessibility and the ability to fully focus on their own developments.
Reducing costs for them is rather a pleasant side effect.
And what about Russia? What guides domestic startups that have (for now) a little less opportunity than Netflix? We will tell in our next material.
PS Here are some more posts from our corporate blog:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/345408/
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