[shawnb576]

I worked at a large valley based company that had their own data centers and badly wanted to decrease infra spend.

It's WAY harder than it sounds.

Remember Twitter is not a profitable company which means the likelihood of a bunch of low-hanging fruit for savings is very low. That's been done already.

There are not likely "oh look we found a whole DC sitting idle, oops" sort of savings. Any vendors they use are ALREADY giving them huge discounts.

I'm not saying Twitter is efficient or that this is physically impossible (tho it might be), I'm saying its not easy and takes skilled people a long time to iterate to lower-cost systems or designs that don't have massive stability or performance tradeoffs.

[djmips]

All of what you say is speculation. In reality there might be a huge amount of waste where it's just become an accustomed part of the culture <- also speculation.

[nullc]

> Remember Twitter is not a profitable company which means the likelihood of a bunch of low-hanging fruit for savings is very low.

That's circular. Their revenue is astronomical. They're not profitable because they're spending it all. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of low hanging opportunities (or that there are).

Hidden recordings of twitter staff had the describing the places as more of a lifestyle business where profit isn't a major goal and many people worked very limited amounts. It could have been useless bluster but if there was any basis to it, it's a good indication that massive savings should be possible.