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Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

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Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#81

Post by matt4077 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #54
discodave wrote: post #44

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!

That's ascribing emotions to a situation where they don't really matter.

Amazon's selling. Netflix is buying. It'd be stupid to refuse the money. Netflix wouldn't lose much sleep over it–at their size, building their own infrastructure can't be much worse than renting.

Plus you'd get the idea out there that Amazon isn't the sort of reliable utility company their marketing suggests. They have their fingers in so many markets, a third of their customers would start to fear being cut off.

AWS is also a separate division within Amazon, and probably not lacking self-confidence. The people are judged by the numbers of AWS, and they'd probably resist attempts to get them to forgo revenue just for the sake of some other division's feeling.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#82

Post by puzzle »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #72
ghaff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Netflix now needs to hire and manage a huge infrastructure team that they don't have today. (Not to say they don't have ops folks but the incremental need would be enormous.) That's not to say it might not be a worthwhile approach over the long run but it would be a huge strategic investment in something that has essentially nothing to do with what they view as their core differentiating service to customers. Woul…

Their infrastructure team + infrastructure would be cheaper then their Amazon spend, guaranteed (based on known Amazon margins). And disentangling be disruptive? Stand up your new datacenter and shift your apps over with DNS when they're ready to serve production traffic. If you can move traffic between regions, you can move it between on prem and cloud.

You assume that Netflix pays retail price.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#83

Post by dpitkin »

sloreti wrote: post #59
BurningFrog wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

See the recent Walmart / Amazon kerfuffle it's like employee non-competes to me http://fortune.com/2017/06/21/walmart-amazon-whole-foods/?__...

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#84

Post by pier25 »

ot wrote: post #26
pier25 wrote: post #8

> Its application code is still developed using PHP This is surprising since 1) Facebook is most likely using Hack and 2) it could save a lot of money by moving to Go. > Facebook’s entire site runs on HHVM (desktop, API and mobile) Isn't Facebook running mostly on React? I'm guessing HHVM only really powers the API, business logic, etc.

> 2) it could save a lot of money by moving to Go. [citation needed]

Even if they reduced their server usage by 10% that would amount to a lot of money, and it's probable the performance benefit would be much higher than that.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#85

Post by pier25 »

sgslo wrote: post #11
pier25 wrote: post #8

> Its application code is still developed using PHP This is surprising since 1) Facebook is most likely using Hack and 2) it could save a lot of money by moving to Go. > Facebook’s entire site runs on HHVM (desktop, API and mobile) Isn't Facebook running mostly on React? I'm guessing HHVM only really powers the API, business logic, etc.

HHVM is a VM for executing Hack and PHP, used extensively on the backend at Facebook. The majority (all?) of the front end and mobile apps are powered by React and React Native, respectively.

Yes, that was why I mentioned it. The article said PHP was powering their web apps, but in fact it's only powering the APIs since their frontends are SPAs.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#86

Post by voidlogic »

BurningFrog wrote: post #54
discodave wrote: post #44

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!

Whats more remarkable is Netflix uses them! If I was Netflix I would not fund a competitor unless it was truly best most cost effective option by a significant margin. Amazon's margin isn't in retail, its in infrastructure.

A lot of big companies that compete with Amazon in some vertical have a no-Amazon policy for infrastructure. Some even require their business associates (vendors, etc) commit to contracts to do the same.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#87

Post by chc »

jacques_chester wrote: post #67
chc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apache 2 is somewhat less permissive than Facebook's choice of BSD + patent grant. I agree that people probably wouldn't have been able to spread the FUD so successfully if they'd gone for a more conventional setup, but the licenses are short (probably shorter than Apache combined) and pretty clear. It feels pretty unfair to say "Facebook's open source dev team deserve to have their names run down because they chose more permissive license terms than we're used to."

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#88

Post by Thaxll »

drawkbox wrote: post #27

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…

Netflix is small since 99% of their traffic hits CDN.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#89

Post by closeparen »

geggam wrote: post #58
rbranson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Former Facebook employee) The VAST majority of online serving code at Facebook is written in Hack (PHP) and is part of a gigantic codebase called fbwww. Backend services that do heavy lifting (mostly search, feed ranking, ad matching, TAO, various caches, proxies, etc) are fairly light on business logic and written in C++. It isn't a microservices architecture at all: they only move stuff to C++ for latency and effi…

Do you know of any place actually using microservices at scale ? ( 400 Million + users )

Your definition of "at scale" doesn't seem to leave room for Amazon, Netflix, or Uber (all in tens to low hundreds of million monthly active users according to a cursory Google search) but... those.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#90

Post by pier25 »

pryelluw wrote: post #12
pier25 wrote: post #8

> Its application code is still developed using PHP This is surprising since 1) Facebook is most likely using Hack and 2) it could save a lot of money by moving to Go. > Facebook’s entire site runs on HHVM (desktop, API and mobile) Isn't Facebook running mostly on React? I'm guessing HHVM only really powers the API, business logic, etc.

Explain point #2, please.

Let's imagine Facebook spends 2 billion on servers every year. If it could reduce the number of servers by 20% because of the better Go performance it would save 200 million every year.

Go outperforms HHVM by a wider margin than 20%. I've seen benchmarks as high as 50%. Sure, benchmarks aren't real world applications, but it's safe to say that generally speaking Go is significantly faster than HHVM.

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