Uber public space
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Had been wondering who Uber was using for email, DNS, hosting, etc. Email is G-Suite, DNS is UltraDNS, and hosting is Uber Technologies. So, assuming they are hosting in-house after some very light digging.
Their company worth is around $6.5B and revenue is down $2.5B. When you're in the
billions, in themillions, in the hundreds of thousands, where do you look for some of those services? I don't consider their DNS, hosting, and email in the same table discussion as who they've gone with for those services.Let's get controversial. I don't own a multi-billion dollar company so my honest opinion is inherently wrong, because what I think is inherently incorrect. But they are doing their own hosting in house, and everything else is with appears to be fairly (subjective) standard providers. Nothing is premium here. UltraDNS for DNS and Google for email are great when you're tiny to intermediate, education, or just looking to save money. As someone who has supported both on a scale with thousands of users, that is my personal opinion. Self-hosting makes sense when you either have no budget or are massive, but the in between doesn't make sense to me for security purposes.
I think there is a point where you go with those services because you're small and waiting to scale, and where they are at now and some people might think "how have you never migrated?" I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
Flame on, please. I'd like to hear some different perspectives. I likely won't provide any input for at least a few days so that I don't stifle conversation.
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Google is number one for the biggest email systems. G Suite is the biggest of the big when it comes to scale. Office 365 is number two. There is literally no one else in their game space. And I guarantee that when you are Uber and call Google for service, you get discounts that make it completely impossible to compete with it in house.
Exchange is good, but very different from Google Mail. If you don't want Exchange (who does... it's really just a legacy product, modern companies don't really look at it and Uber is a young California start up) and you don't want to run things like Zimbra yourself what other enterprise option is there?
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@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
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@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
They're modern enough that they scoff at anything but Google Mail and use MySQL for their customer DB? I don't get it... Why not PostgreSQL, or MariaDB?
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@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
They're modern enough that they scoff at anything but Google Mail and use MySQL for their customer DB? I don't get it... Why not PostgreSQL, or MariaDB?
They specifically moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. They started on PostgreSQL and switched. Presumably they went with MySQL over MariaDB because they want Oracle commercial support.
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For some operations, MySQL will be faster than PostgreSQL. And we don't know what engine they are using. But it is very possible that MySQL is simply better for their dataset.
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@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
They're modern enough that they scoff at anything but Google Mail and use MySQL for their customer DB? I don't get it... Why not PostgreSQL, or MariaDB?
They specifically moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. They started on PostgreSQL and switched. Presumably they went with MySQL over MariaDB because they want Oracle commercial support.
How can you validate that?
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@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
They're modern enough that they scoff at anything but Google Mail and use MySQL for their customer DB? I don't get it... Why not PostgreSQL, or MariaDB?
They specifically moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. They started on PostgreSQL and switched. Presumably they went with MySQL over MariaDB because they want Oracle commercial support.
How can you validate that?
Performance? Support costs.
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@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
They're modern enough that they scoff at anything but Google Mail and use MySQL for their customer DB? I don't get it... Why not PostgreSQL, or MariaDB?
They specifically moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. They started on PostgreSQL and switched. Presumably they went with MySQL over MariaDB because they want Oracle commercial support.
How can you validate that?
Performance? Support costs.
Operations. Are you assuming what they are using, or you have inside information and know what they switched from, and why?
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@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
They're modern enough that they scoff at anything but Google Mail and use MySQL for their customer DB? I don't get it... Why not PostgreSQL, or MariaDB?
They specifically moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. They started on PostgreSQL and switched. Presumably they went with MySQL over MariaDB because they want Oracle commercial support.
How can you validate that?
Performance? Support costs.
Operations. Are you assuming what they are using, or you have inside information and know what they switched from, and why?
I guess the question is, are you speculating or do you actually know?
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@bbigford said in Uber public space:
But they are doing their own hosting in house....
That really have to. You can't host an application like Uber on traditional hosting. No hosting provider can handle that. No really large website or application can use someone else's hosting. They might use cloud servers, but they need their own code running on their own systems.
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@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
I'm curious to see what their customer DB uses, and what they use for financial processing and front end.
They use MySQL.
They're modern enough that they scoff at anything but Google Mail and use MySQL for their customer DB? I don't get it... Why not PostgreSQL, or MariaDB?
They specifically moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. They started on PostgreSQL and switched. Presumably they went with MySQL over MariaDB because they want Oracle commercial support.
How can you validate that?
Performance? Support costs.
Operations. Are you assuming what they are using, or you have inside information and know what they switched from, and why?
I guess the question is, are you speculating or do you actually know?
I know that they decided to switch. Those are the logical reasons why we'd assume that they would.
The ONLY reason that people pick MySQL over MariaDB is for Oracle support. PostgreSQL vs MariaDB would be around performance for your workload.
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@scottalanmiller said in Uber public space:
@bbigford said in Uber public space:
But they are doing their own hosting in house....
No hosting provider can handle that.
They could, AWS/Azure/GCP, but the client would be paying insane amounts for it until they finally level off and can host it in-house while maintaining compliance (although, wherever "in house" is, that compliance might be offloaded to a data center who has part in that literature and effort... hard fork before I get off topic). I'd be interested to see who they had hosting their stuff at the peak before they went in-house (if they were ever external).
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@bbigford said in Uber public space:
They could, AWS/Azure/GCP, ....
Those are clouds, not hosting providers. Very different things. Most small hosting providers are on those. Even some big ones.
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Uber, like pretty much anyone their size, probably uses a combination of their own datacenters and cloud for scaling. Some large players go purely cloud to keep things simple and consistent. Others do a mix so that they don't have to pay for their own scaling.
