Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

blog.sqlizer.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#41

Post by goo »

bedros wrote: post #15
ryandvm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the reason Facebook doesn't resell their infrastructure is because their endgame is to _be_ the internet. From their point of view, any site you're on that isn't Facebook is their competition.

That's exactly why only a fool will use reactjs in their web design, because FB will put you out of business and if you sue them for infringing your patents, your reactjs license is revoked

To be clear: reactjs uses the 3 Clause BSD license. https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/LICENSE

It's incredibly permissive (nearly the same as the MIT license), and does not allow for the concept of having it "revoked".

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#42

Post by unclebucknasty »

matchagaucho wrote: post #21
ryandvm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the reason Facebook doesn't resell their infrastructure is because their endgame is to _be_ the internet. From their point of view, any site you're on that isn't Facebook is their competition.

FB open sourced their infrastructure. Anyone can lift these designs and build their data centers using identical specs. http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/SpecsAndDesigns

I think both points are true: FB does want to be the Internet, but they also realize that the path to that endgame lies in capturing (and driving) behavior, not in building infrastructure.

The latter is just a necessary tool. But, you're not going to threaten FB 's mission by simply building out an identical (or even superior) infrastructure. So, there's virtually zero-risk to them in open-sourcing it.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#43

Post by exelius »

ivansavz wrote: post #31

Since we're guesstimating numbers a lot, it would be interesting to also guesstimate the human resources costs required to run the infrastructure: X electrical engineers, Y cooling engineers, Z SREs, W infrastructure devops ppls, etc. Using the cloud you don't need X,Y,Z and presumably will need less of W. Assuming a 100+k/year salary, that's like 200+k/year total cost of employment. If X+Y+Z-ΔW ~= 1000, then the clo…

Right; but it doesn't change the fact that any company capable of operating technical infrastructure at scale (aka any company with compute/storage needs above a half-dozen long rows of racks at a datacenter) can do it for about 60% of what it would cost on AWS.

AWS is still a huge boon to startups from a cash flow perspective - it's like leasing equipment rather than buying it, except you're also leasing a very small fraction of all the folks you need to build/operate the equipment. It's also very cheap compared to trying to build and run the infrastructure yourself at small scale.

And don't kid yourself -- you still need SREs in AWS. They're working on different issues, but AWS introduces as many issues in an SRE's scope as it removes.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#44

Post by discodave »

I don't understand why people think that companies can get special pricing from AWS but not drive feature development. Large customers like Netflix, GE & friends get to drive feature development. Heck, if you're the CIA and give AWS $600 MM they will build a private region for you!

This post has two contradictory quotes in my opinion:

"It’s worth noting that this AWS price wouldn’t be what Facebook paid in this hypothetical situation. Much like Snapchat and Netflix, Facebook would be a heavy and influential user"

"Facebook’s years of specialization for running Facebook are in contrast to AWS, whose storage is designed for multi-purpose (albeit-heavy) use." - Amazon already has several tiers of storage (S3, S3 - Infrequent Access, Glacier, CloudFront)... who is to say that they wouldn't be motivated to introduce more classes by a large customer like FB.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#45

Post by EGreg »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #37
matchagaucho wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB open sourced their infrastructure. Anyone can lift these designs and build their data centers using identical specs. http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/SpecsAndDesigns

...which gives you a moderately-expensive pile of laser-focused hardware and nothing to run on it. Far less than half the infrastructure story. (Not that I'm criticizing Facebook. Open-sourcing code is hard -- see Borg.)

Nothing to run on it??

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#46

Post by adventured »

jzelinskie wrote: post #7

I think a lot of the smaller details this article glosses over contribute to FB's ability to run on so few machines. For example, comparing my anecdotes of FB's internal network (they probably have the most organized/mature IPv6 network on the planet) with those of my AWS public cloud experience, I'd reckon that a lot of FB applications would require architectural redesigns to operate in that kind of environment. The…

They went from $3.6 billion to $10.2 billion in net income in a year. The $3.6 billion is probably more net income than Amazon has generated combined in the last two decades. The $10 billion is more than Amazon will earn a decade from now.

Their focus should be solely on what is going to likely end up being one of the three or four greatest money producing machines in world history (of those owned by a traditional corporation that is).

Cloud computing profits are - and will remain - a joke compared to the $20 billion in net income they'll yield in just a few more years from what they're already doing. Their focus should remain fairly narrow, they're a mere 13 years in at this point. Diving into cloud computing would be making the same exact mistake that Microsoft made with Bing, and that Google made with all their laughable social attempts, and so on. Facebook would split the market further and likely still end up #2 or #3 at best. Their best engineering talent should be solely focused on the golden goose social monopoly, which nobody else has and nobody else can compete with.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#47

Post by notacoward »

coryl wrote: post #28
ryandvm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the reason Facebook doesn't resell their infrastructure is because their endgame is to _be_ the internet. From their point of view, any site you're on that isn't Facebook is their competition.

Maybe, but I think Facebook understands that great products attract users, not scalable/speedy infrastructure.

That's not entirely accurate. Page-load time has a significant effect on user retention. Yes, it's important to have a great product, but being fast is part of being great.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#48

Post by jjeaff »

puzzle wrote: post #36
tyingq wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be relevant if there is some fixed refresh cycle of servers. That is, newer servers can serve more end users because of the faster cpu, drives, etc. The author seems to have skipped the concept though.

Yeah, I looked through the article, but never does he mention that one rack of today's server vintage might have an extra order of magnitude more RAM, if not cores, than one from 5 years ago. Ten years ago, four-core Barcelona Opterons were so hot and in high demand that, if you wanted to be on the latest servers, you had to show a performance boost worth the premium. Sometime this year you'll be able to buy dual pro…

I assume that their assumption is that the facebook application has grown in complexity to keep pace with better servers. There is certainly a lot more going on as they had several years ago.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#49

Post by jacquesm »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #33
bedros wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why only a fool will use reactjs in their web design, because FB will put you out of business and if you sue them for infringing your patents, your reactjs license is revoked

I see lots of down voting on this person, but not many replies. Is there truth to this comment? Is React licensing something companies should avoid?

Not a fan of FB here. That comment is nonsense. It is completely unthinkable that Facebook would do this.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#50

Post by benjanik »

samstave wrote: post #40
jsolson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the big things it glosses over is core counts... counting "servers" ignores that AWS has current-gen instance families with as few as 32 VCPUs in their largest instance type versus 128 VCPUs in the x1 family. If you look at multiple generations of families the difference between "servers" becomes even more stark.

PleSe expand on this

I think what he means is that not all servers are created equal, so counting "servers" is a useless metric. An EC2 32xlarge instance with 128 VCPUs is going to handle far more traffic than a large number of smaller servers.
Post reply on HN