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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?

#111

Post by p0rkbelly »

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…

You are also thinking about this in a perfect vacuum. Global scale presents an entirely different --non-technical-- challenge.

Take for example, Dropbox stated they are moving off AWS -- except in Europe (and other non-US areas I'm sure). Having boots on the ground abroad, operating 24/7, dedicated to the mission of the company where they have not even visited ... near impossible.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/2016/09/making-european-i...

Why? Hiring people around the globe is hard who are going to remove that HDD 24/7 is pretty hard. Hiring lawyers to understand foreign law is hard. Keeping your company focused abroad and building a culture abroad is very hard.

How long does it take for a company to expand to India on their own? In AWS, you just change your CloudFormation template to another region.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#112

Post by 19eightyfour »

schitzapplebits wrote: post #99
19eightyfour wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not remarkable its Bezos' business strategy. The way he thinks about things is it's not a threat to his business to have competitors in his space not just because he is prepared to undercut them on cost but because he knows that his true focus is on customer satisfaction. And competition, whether through providing customers with a choice or encouraging his own systems to provide better services is good for his b…

> Seriously how would it look if Amazon turned down a company because they were competing? It would be an admission of defeat and weakness for AZ. That's not how an "apex predator" thinks. It looked shitty when it happened with Amazon and Apple

Could you elaborate on what happened? I don't know about this.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#113

Post by daxfohl »

EGreg wrote: post #104
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. "Infrastructure" means a lot of things. You don't get Tupperware, their scheduling and resource management infrastructure, most of their logging infra, most of their monitoring infra, operating systems for the whitebox hardware, even power and facilities management for the OC stuff... I could go on. They are quite good about releasing open source, which is why I was careful to point out that I'm not criticiz…

Isn't there any software that would let you run your own social network like facebook on that hardware?

Sure, you could write a social network app (or any other server-side app) and run it on that hardware. It just wouldn't take advantage of any of the Facebook-specific features on that hardware. So you'd be paying for a lot of stuff you're not using. For Facebook, it's more valuable to use it as Facebook hardware than to rent it out as generic servers, because Facebook actually uses all its proprietary features.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#114

Post by BurningFrog »

careersuicide wrote: post #96
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!

I work at a company that sells ebooks and directly competes with Amazon in that space. All of our infrastructure is on AWS. We could move elsewhere easily if we had to, but we probably won't. A good friend who works over at AWS said that they were "more than happy to have [our] business". In terms of net revenue it's probably way in their favor.

It's certainly good PR for Amazon to treat even serious competitors fair on AWS.

Amazon seems to want to be in every business sector there is, so almost any company could end up competing with them.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#115

Post by bedros »

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

for those who downvoted me, can you explain why I'm wrong,

Would you believe that Apple today would use react in their products?

What would Steve Jobs say to someone who suggests using react in apple software/saas?

downvoting on HN is being abused here, just because someone is a big fan of reactjs and disagrees with me, they automatically downvote a valid opinion based on facts.

see for yourself, from react patent clause "The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice,"

https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#116

Post by [deleted] »

goo wrote: post #41
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

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".

[deleted]

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#117

Post by daxfohl »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #13
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…

> The real question isn't "can FB be hosted on AWS?", it's "why isn't FB competing with AWS?" because what they've already got is much better for the range of applications that they deploy. This. When they bought Parse I thought for sure they would get into the same business as AWS / Azure / etc but then they phased it out. Their have so much network infrastructure I thought for sure they would want to offer such ser…

Nah, see Yegge's platform rant: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX. Facebook already is a platform. They have no need to go into platform-of-a-platform territory. Their platform is what they've created already, so they've dedicated hardware/network designs strictly around that. Going "metaplatform" would just make their own platform slower.

Also to recognize: Amazon is a store, not an application. It doesn't need specialized hardware or whatever. Its customers care much more about package delivery speed / cost, etc than whatever hardware is running in the background. So it can box the same generic web servers it uses and sell them at scale. Facebook is entirely digital. It needs to specialize everything hardware-wise in order to stay ahead. The things it optimizes for, in terms of hardware, likely has no relevance to 99.9999% of basic CRUD apps out there. So they stick to what they do best. Their own platform.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#118

Post by bedros »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
notheguyouthink wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you're a threat to FB, the unthinkable will happen.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#119

Post by geggam »

closeparen wrote: post #89
geggam wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Guess my perspective of scale is different.

Its just an observation of having worked on systems at scale and I dont see the microservices / containers used.

I am curious if anyone else has.

The more I am around containers and the network complexity/issues that are created the less I am convinced it is the most optimal way and I am looking for opinions that differ from mine so I can learn

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#120

Post by zeep »

p0rkbelly wrote: post #107

Keep in mind, you can bet your ass that prices would be drastically lower than the public prices posted. Large enterprises of any significance, and especially flagship/strategic customers, don't pay list prices. Every cloud provider has private pricing and enterprise discount programs. That goes for all hardware vendors (e.g. Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Oracle, etc selling to any company) as well. I'm sure Netflix pay…

wholesale vs retail costs...
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