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Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

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Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#121

Post by hansmayer »

isaacremuant wrote: post #112
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "ideological zealotry" you mean "scientific research." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660... https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/... https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c... And so on. Reality is AirBnB has been absolutely catastrophic financially in many urban areas, with unhelpful political consequences. It has been - provably - a huge cont…

[flagged]

Not to burst your weird leftist-rightist libertarian bubble, but vaccine passports are actually a fairly normal thing in most of the world mate. You know, it's just about documenting what vaccinations you were receiving throughout your lifetime. Go outside and touch the grass, you sound very angry.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#122

Post by throwaway894345 »

WJW wrote: post #68
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.

Form and no function is the essence of social media apps though, so they nailed that. 300 million monthly and 100m daily users is also pretty decent, so I don't think "nobody" cares. For comparison, that's approximately the same number of MAU as twitter.

In fairness, that successful is probably less to do with the merits of the product and more to do with the timely exodus of users from Twitter and aggressive marketing from Meta’s other properties. I’m not saying Threads is bad—I haven’t used it—only that the success or failure of social media offerings is rarely attributable to the platform itself as opposed to the network of users.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#123

Post by hansmayer »

gosub100 wrote: post #93
hansmayer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See further below please, I wrote just about this kind of tunnel-vision focus on DAU/MAU vs. a more holistic view ;)

Someone disputes your claim with actual data, then you move the goalposts and appeal to a "holistic" view.

Well the thing is, I never argued on the basis of revenue in the first place, and that second argument I wrote in response to someone else, not this person. But even if we did take revenue as sole metric of success (remember kids, revenue!=profits!), well, if the Meta CFO states that they dont see Threads as a driver of their revenue for the whole of 2025, who am I to dispute that really? But maybe you folks have some insider insights ;)

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#124

Post by jjice »

vasco wrote: post #4

> Moreover, once it [Threads] was developed, the infrastructure teams were given only two day’s notice to prepare for its production launch. Most large organizations would take longer than two days just to draft a project plan involving dozens of interdependent teams, let alone execute it. At Meta, however, we quickly established war rooms across distributed sites, bringing together both infrastructure and product te…

I'd hate to have this kind of pressure every day, but a week long sprint like this does sound like it was kind of fun. These things can _suck_ when they're out of nowhere and there's a lot of pressure, but I've also had product hack-weeks that were just an absolute blast.

That said, I'm a young single guy. If I had a family and no lead time, this doesn't sound great.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#125

Post by pavlov »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #28
vasco wrote: post #4

> Moreover, once it [Threads] was developed, the infrastructure teams were given only two day’s notice to prepare for its production launch. Most large organizations would take longer than two days just to draft a project plan involving dozens of interdependent teams, let alone execute it. At Meta, however, we quickly established war rooms across distributed sites, bringing together both infrastructure and product te…

They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.

Threads has 320 million monthly active users and 100 million daily.

It’s certainly not a flop. It’s almost as big as X globally.

There’s a tremendous locality bias around Meta’s products. Social media use is very localized by geography and age. So if all your friends stopped using Facebook ten years ago, you assume that’s probably true everywhere, while in fact they’ve added several billion users on FB since then.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#126

Post by Workaccount2 »

pjc50 wrote: post #73
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.

Threads is odd. The thing about Twitter was its very high media profile; you'd see tweets quoted in all sorts of places like newspapers and TV. The sharp heel turn is in the process of killing that, especially by closing off the site to not logged in users, but you can still see people quoting/screenshotting tweets on other sites. Including bluesky. I don't think I've ever seen a viral Threads post that escaped the n…

The most perplexing move for me was the decision to not automatically give Instagram users a threads account that they were logged into.

I'm sure Meta has some internal reputation metric for Insta accounts, and it would have been trivial to give all accounts above a threshold immediate access to threads.

But nope, you have to create a threads account to view threads.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#127

Post by chubot »

yuliyp wrote: post #2

I find it interesting how they describe the PHP web front end as a "serverless" or "function as a service" architecture. I guess it's a matter of perspective. It's a service that has a monolithic codebase with lots of endpoints deployed to it. I guess from the perspective of the maintainer of one of those endpoints it's "serverless" but that abstraction (like all abstractions) has leaks: the teams responsible for the…

PHP is definitely the original serverless! You upload your code and someone else runs it!

CGI is also serverless

I wrote a couple articles with these comparisons, and related issues:

Comments on Scripting, CGI, and FastCGI https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/06/cgi.html

Comments on Shared Unix Hosting vs. the Cloud https://oils.pub/blog/2025/02/shared-hosting.html

---

I'm not the only one who thinks this: https://www.devever.net/~hl/mildlydynamic

AWS Lambda: CGI But It's Trendy. Recently we've seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.

People who don't think this is true probably never used PHP or CGI ... You don't manage the server; you just upload your code!

Architecturally, it is the same. From the user experience, it is the same.

PHP and CGI also scale infinitely, because they are stateless. Meta scales PHP to a user base of half the world's population. They could also scale CGI/FastCGI.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#128

Post by notyourwork »

mukunda_johnson wrote: post #50
ianlevesque wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? It has more than 300M users.

I think most of those are Instagram shoving it in your face. Yeah I'm a "Threads user", but only because of the inline feed in Instagram. I'm annoyed when there is a notification blip but it turns out to be Threads spam.

Same annoyance here!

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#129

Post by throwaway2562 »

isaacremuant wrote: post #112
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "ideological zealotry" you mean "scientific research." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660... https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/... https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c... And so on. Reality is AirBnB has been absolutely catastrophic financially in many urban areas, with unhelpful political consequences. It has been - provably - a huge cont…

[flagged]

Ach. You seem full of (unrelated, unwarranted) ragefulness, and you stand ready to handwave away both scientific studies and actual user experience. Without, I see, providing any grounded counterpoints. As a bonus, anyone who disagrees with you is a ‘tool’ of sinister ‘bad actors’

Are you quite sure you’re on the right forum? That’s not generally how we do things here.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#130

Post by UltraSane »

philg_jr wrote: post #107

Amazing. All of this truly wild, impressive technology and some of the absolute best engineers in the world, just to shove more ads in people's eyeballs. Sigh.

That was the old Facebook. The new Facebook is about manipulation of people's politics and opinions.
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