URS HOLZLE: We've all heard about Snapchat.
A small team of engineers that have
built one of the most popular applications
on the internet today.
And it's been fun for us to partner with them.
And so I'm excited today to welcome Bob Murphy, CTO,
and co-founder of Snapchat to the stage
so we can hear their story first hand.
Sorry, Bobby.
Please come up.
[APPLAUSE]
BOBBY MURPHY: Hello.
URS HOLZLE: Bobby, glad meeting you.
All right, so I'm curious how you actually got
started with both the idea, and sort of the infrastructure.
What led you there?
BOBBY MURPHY: Yeah.
So Evan and I got started on Snapchat summer of 2011.
Basically, kind of understood that visual content
was the most engaging, interesting form of content
that there was.
And wanted to create a way to enable
that to be a means of communication,
rather than a piece of content around which communication
actually happened.
So that was sort of the initial concept behind Snapchat.
We launched on Google App Engine because I'd
used App Engine a couple times for some small projects,
found it was super easy to get up and running.
And at the time, obviously, our biggest priority
was to get a product in the hands of users
in the world-- in the real world-- as quickly as possible.
And so I turned again to App Engine, something
I was very familiar with.
And a platform that very easily abstracts away
a lot of the complexities of building, deploying, and a web
backend into the real world.
And I think at the time, App Engine
was actually still in preview, so we
took a chance on a new platform.
But I was fairly confident that given
Google's kind of reputation as a very strong infrastructure
company, that anything we built on App Engine
would eventually scale if we needed it to.
URS HOLZLE: And it did.
BOBBY MURPHY: Yep.
URS HOLZLE: Can you tell us a little bit
about how the platform supported your launch of more
recent features, like the stories feature
that you launched just recently?
BOBBY MURPHY: Yeah, absolutely.
It's actually been very surprising for us,
and like super fortunate, to see cloud platform
kind of grow its feature set almost perfectly in sync
with our own feature needs.
It's actually funny looking at the timeline earlier,
because we've taken advantage of almost all
of those product offerings almost immediately
upon them being released to the general public.
So around the time that we were launching stories, which
was fall of last year, App Engine
was great for our core application,
but we were looking for something a little bit
more flexible to support the stories architecture, which
currently uses Retis on a huge cluster of Compute Engine
instances.
And so we were looking around, and it
was exactly when Compute Engine launched to the general public,
and so along with outgoing socket connections
from App Engine front end.
So it was actually perfect timing for us.
That's worked and scaled tremendously well.
URS HOLZLE: So you're running lots of Retis today?
BOBBY MURPHY: We are.
Yeah, we've got, I think, 256 master nodes,
and two slaves per each, and with a twin proxy
cluster in front, and Google load
balancers in front of that.
URS HOLZLE: OK.
And so, obviously, that all came with a huge amount of growth,
right?
Not just in the beginning, but actually,
it's really an amazing thing, is that the growth has just
been keeping up.
So how have we helped you?
I hope we have helped you.
BOBBY MURPHY: Yep.
Yeah, you guys have seen the growth first hand.
Absolutely.
So, I mean, the biggest benefit is just the fact
that we can focus much less on maintaining infrastructure,
and much more on building new infrastructure to support
the features and the product developments that we need.
In fact, actually, Tim, one of our VPs of engineering,
just last week told me, one of his biggest surprises
at joining Snapchat was at not having
to deal with the operational headache and complexity
that he was expecting, and you would
expect from a company at our growth
rate and our current scale.
So, yeah, the biggest benefit is just the fact
that we can focus less on maintaining infrastructure
and much more on building new stuff.
URS HOLZLE: And so as far as I understand,
you still don't have an operations team, really.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
BOBBY MURPHY: No, not really.
We're at about 25 engineers now, and a little bit
of operational work here and there, but for the most part,
everyone's focused on new feature development.
URS HOLZLE: Cool.
So if you had a piece of advice for anyone
out there who wants to build the next Snapchat on a Google
Platform-- a cloud platform-- how should they go about it?
BOBBY MURPHY: I would just say it's a super easy platform
to use.
We got started on App Engine, which
is amazingly simple to use, and has scaled tremendously well.
I've been absolutely impressed and very surprised
that it's scaled as well as it has.
I certainly thought, early on, the kind of traditional notion
of, you build on a hosted solution,
and then you reach a certain size, at which you have
to move off, I think is fading, and Google's kind
of paving the way there.
And so, what's great about App Engine,
and cloud platform in general, is
that you get that kind of up-front ease of use
with the added comfort of knowing that whatever you're
building, if it needs to, will eventually scale ad infinitum.
URS HOLZLE: Great!
Let's go to infinity and beyond.
BOBBY MURPHY: Right.
URS HOLZLE: Thanks, Bobby.
BOBBY MURPHY: Yep.
URS HOLZLE: Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]