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

101–110 of 164 posts

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#101

Post by vacri »

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?"

A naive guess would be that providing services for users you don't control is harder than for users you do control.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#102

Post by vacri »

> We need to take into account that Facebook not only has double the users but also more data created per person - photos, videos, live streams etc. Plus it now hosts Instagram. So let’s double the number.

... but apparently no efficiency gains in 5 years to reduce the number again? Faster processes, more cores, more ram, better storage, more senior-developer-hours, bespoke datacentres... ?

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#103

Post by concede_pluto »

cbhl wrote: post #14
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.

I imagine the lifetime savings of having a backend in Go is dwarfed by the one-time cost of such a migration. That's why they invented Hack and HHVM in the first place -- it was a cheap-enough compromise that didn't require rewriting the whole code base.

It's not one-time; Go will always have an ongoing time cost in reading and writing tedious boilerplate to reimplement features Hack already had built in.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#104

Post by EGreg »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #77
EGreg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing to run on it??

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?

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#105

Post by ksec »

sjg007 wrote: post #57
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me, the most important part of Netflix isn't the encoding or compute parts, ( AWS ), but the delivery. And all of their delivery, networks are already done by themselves through Open Connect and OP Server.

So they already have their own system. As as some below have mentioned, they could simply move to Azure if they wanted without much trouble.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#106

Post by TheChetan »

In 2012 Facebook had 1BN users and 180K servers. 1,000,000 users / 180,000 servers = 5,556 users per server In 2017 Facebook has close to 2BN users. 2,000,000 users / 5556 users per server = 360,000 servers

Notice how the 1B has only 6 zeros. The awesome part is that this mistake evens itself out later, yielding a correct number for "The of servers".

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#107

Post by p0rkbelly »

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 pays nowhere near public pricing on AWS and I'm sure AWS pays less than anyone in the world for an Intel CPU.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#108

Post by kevan »

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.

Counting website users isn't a great metric for Amazon because a lot of the traffic is from AWS. But Amazon has been successfully running on a service oriented architecture for about 15 years now.

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#109

Post by p0rkbelly »

virtuallynathan wrote: post #56

I'd have to assume Facebook is using well over 500TB/mo of outbound traffic. I'd Assume on the order of 1-2Tbps or more on average. Disclamer: I work for AWS.

500TB/mo is nothing for FB or AWS.

Hope you don't work with any anything to do with scale at AWS.

You're looking more towards 1 Exabyte a month...

Re: Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?

#110

Post by daxfohl »

19eightyfour wrote: post #76
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!

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…

Hmm, sounds like it's the new "embrace, extend, extinguish".
Post reply on HN