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 hypot…
Sidenote: It's remarkable that Amazon happily provides server services to Netflix, who is a huge competitor!
It's a benchmark for transistor density, nothing else. Of course a single company could grow faster than transistor density can scale. The only possible insight, if you can call it that, is that facebook owns more square centimeters of transistors now than they did in 2012.
That's the original inspiration, but I thought people adopted the exponential rate from the original context as a bench mark for all sorts of stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Other_formulatio... . At best I can figure the problem with the auhtor's usage is that it's not relative to a per unit performance but rather a per enterprise performance, ie not a faster server but more of them over a unit of…
I'm a bit mystified by all the downvotes, am I mistaken in understanding that Moore's law can be understood in a generalized context with respect to the rate not the quantity the rate was originally measured from? Basically he observed a particular rate constant or exponential growth profile. The quoted wiki page states: "Several measures of digital technology are improving at exponential rates related to Moore's law, including the size, cost, density, and speed of components. Moore wrote only about the density of components, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor,"[102] at minimum cost."". So essentially when comparing the growth of one quantity vs another it's not the quantities that are being compared but the rates.
Sidenote: It's remarkable that Amazon happily provides server services to Netflix, who is a huge competitor!
Serious question: Would it be legal for them not to?
IANAL but I don't see a judge deciding that AWS doesn't have a million competitors in every dedicated server host or collocation datacenter, even when AWS was the only cloud infrastructure provider. As long as antitrust laws don't apply, freedom of association is pretty unassailable.
Reddit and Netflix are hosted on AWS so yes you could. You wouldn't run it the same as if you had your own infrastructure though, and probably you would run it more horizontal and cached but it could be done much cheaper than this estimate. On your own environments you can use larger servers, dbs and sharding or clustering is closer. But the cloud is different and you'd be able to run it but differently. The cloud de…
Some big players with their own hardware host overflow capacity in cloud data centers, e.g. so that in DDOS they can dip into additional capacity. I don't know if Facebook does this, but I expect that many of the big players already peer with cloud data centers.
I can see their thought process— "Netflix will most likely exist even if we don't provide them server services as there exist other cloud providers and / or Netflix is big enough to roll their own, so we might as well have a piece of our competitor's success by having their infra spend come to us."
Netflix absolutely should roll their own system. At the very least as a meta layer on top of the major cloud providers.
I didn't know this, this needs to be more well known. How does this affect libraries like preact?
It's not accurate. Facebook offers a blanket patent license with React, and the patent license (not the software license — just the patent one) terminates if you sue Facebook for patent infringement. And of course, if you sue them for any other reason, nothing happens at all. And even if the patent license is terminated, AFAIK React isn't known to be patent-encumbered. Acting like this is some landmine that allows Fa…
I think the cause of the complaint is that if they wanted these things in a license, they could've used Apache 2 and been done with it.
Any confusion that arises from deciding to depart from well-understood licenses is fairly laid at their door, in my view.
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 co…
> 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.
I think the market for cloud computing is very, very large.
Consider that it's a composite of "all server hardware vended or leased" and "a significant fraction of middleware and server software vended".
Microsoft are in it because they follow their existing rivers of gold as they shift. Google are in it because they desperately need a second river of gold to allow them to survive unexpected collapses in advertising revenue.