What is Snapchat spending $400M in hosting costs on?

  • * Database I/O is going to be a rate of knots higher than your average web app * Bandwidth is going to be insane – 1 video sent to 10 friends = 11 times that video has to be sent. * Video processing is a really expensive operation – they'll do more of this than you'd think * While processing could be done locally, it'll be insanely slow compared to the cloud, and lining up expectations of iOS vs Android is a fairly complex task