Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure
Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth. This sounds like a really bad move on their part and they should have committed to building out their own infrastructure on 'bare metal' over the next 5 years instead.If you read their S-1, they list a dependence on Google cloud as one of their big risk factors. Yet they then go ahead and make this commitment instead of working towards eliminating it.There's so many advantages to owning your stack and if Snap thinks that it's going to need 2 billion dollars to pay for cloud infra, they're at the scale where it makes sense to build your own infra. Just look at Facebook, they're able to create tailor made data-centers that fit precisely what they need. The success of Snap relies on huge scale on the consumer side, if they want to scale their infra to support that 5 years down the line then this sounds like a poor move since they will either need to play catch-up later on or prepare to pay serious dough to Google.Paying for cloud services seems like a great idea when you are not able to predict your needs in the coming years, given a deal like this I don't think that's the case.