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Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

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Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#91

Post by infecto »

pinoy420 wrote: post #44
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…

Sounds like a horrific place to work. Imagine the pressure

Its surely not for everyone but I think this is the wrong take. They did not detail how the rest of the days look but one can imagine they are not launching a Threads every week/month/year. This must have been an exciting project for folks.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#92

Post by ribadeo »

ribadeo wrote: post #90
sofixa wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you know that you can use YAML and provision actual cloud provider resources with boring tech? Welcome to Ansible Anyone using Ansible for cloud infrastructure management is not to be taken seriously. It's among the worst tools for the job - not (always) idempotent, no state tracking, slow, very limited in the resources it can manage, very lacking templating, fun stuff like "state: absent", running, and then ha…

Way to lose the forest for the trees. I was making a point about provisioning VPSes instead of trying to wrangle postgresql restores inside kubectl or equivalent, of how your cloud provider is already provisioning a single physical server via a hypervisor. I was making a point that facecrook overengineering is about them being boxed into corners, about how very little of big techs solutions translate to real world us…

The world is not idempotent either. Neither are any facebook production rollouts lol

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#93

Post by gosub100 »

hansmayer wrote: post #80
motorest wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Precisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect. This comment is perplexing. Reportedly Threads has 130 million monthly active users (and growing) vs. 550 million accessing X (and shrinking). This alone already p…

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.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#94

Post by throwaway2562 »

isaacremuant wrote: post #71
hansmayer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAU is a very one-dimensional and misleading KPI, one that gave us ever-growing, VC-backed unprofitable companies. The Threads is definitely net-negative in the sense of wider impact and not just single-dimensional KPIs. Take as example Uber and AirBnB. Both have had millions of active users and one could argue their service is even useful to a lot of people. It's still quite easy to argue that they are are net-negat…

[flagged]

Not being able to get your kid to sleep because the upstairs flat is now a weekend party place for tourists is… a non-problem?

‘Wonderful’ convenience for tourists, sure. Writing off reasonable objections as ‘ideological zealotry’ from ‘bad political actors’ is a very weird take.

Case in point, I recently backed out of buying a house when I found out the house next door was an Airbnb, and the neighbours were not digging the thoughtless visitors. Is that an ideological preference or a pro-sleep one?

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#95

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

isaacremuant wrote: post #71
hansmayer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAU is a very one-dimensional and misleading KPI, one that gave us ever-growing, VC-backed unprofitable companies. The Threads is definitely net-negative in the sense of wider impact and not just single-dimensional KPIs. Take as example Uber and AirBnB. Both have had millions of active users and one could argue their service is even useful to a lot of people. It's still quite easy to argue that they are are net-negat…

[flagged]

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 contributing factor to unaffordable rent increases.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#96

Post by ribadeo »

sofixa wrote: post #62
ribadeo wrote: post #32

At least half their gak is due to them NOT moving quickly and NOT wanting to break things. IIRC, graphql is a means of papering over a bunch of legacy APIs. They removed foreign keys from mysql using it as a column store db, a vestige of the original LAMP stack still on PHP. I don't think Meta infrastructural choices are applicable to most folk. What does serverless land your average dev? A high AWS bill. Elastic man…

> Did you know that you can use YAML and provision actual cloud provider resources with boring tech? Welcome to Ansible Anyone using Ansible for cloud infrastructure management is not to be taken seriously. It's among the worst tools for the job - not (always) idempotent, no state tracking, slow, very limited in the resources it can manage, very lacking templating, fun stuff like "state: absent", running, and then ha…

Consider that your shrill absolute dismissal, "anyone! Not take seriously!" as if Ansible has been proven wrongful in a court of law, as if your statements are law and binding, get over yourself, for everyones sake. Down voting me into oblivion over a well deserved opinion is rather aggressive and this makes this community unpleasant. I am not clueless and don't like beinf treated as if I am.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#97

Post by nijave »

olivermuty wrote: post #6
davedx wrote: post #3

Very interesting, in particular the explicit comparisons with hyperscalers. I almost wonder if this is preparation for them launching their own public cloud. Anyone from Meta care to comment?

It would be pretty impressive to launch a public cloud I would trust even less than GCP :D

A lot of Fortune 50 companies compete in some way with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google so are reluctant to use their services. I think Meta has the benefit of less corporate competition

Anyway in that context, you don't need trust when you have a sufficiently large legal department

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#98

Post by sofixa »

ribadeo wrote: post #96
sofixa wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you know that you can use YAML and provision actual cloud provider resources with boring tech? Welcome to Ansible Anyone using Ansible for cloud infrastructure management is not to be taken seriously. It's among the worst tools for the job - not (always) idempotent, no state tracking, slow, very limited in the resources it can manage, very lacking templating, fun stuff like "state: absent", running, and then ha…

Consider that your shrill absolute dismissal, "anyone! Not take seriously!" as if Ansible has been proven wrongful in a court of law, as if your statements are law and binding, get over yourself, for everyones sake. Down voting me into oblivion over a well deserved opinion is rather aggressive and this makes this community unpleasant. I am not clueless and don't like beinf treated as if I am.

> I am not clueless and don't like beinf treated as if I am.

You made a clueless comment which I tired to (constructively) dismiss. If you don't want to be treated as clueless, don't recommend the equivalent of using a hammer to peel potatoes.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#99

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

Threads has a nice selection of extremely smart, interesting people, trapped inside a short text limit and an algorithmically curated culture of adversarial outrage porn and drama.

BlueSky feels a lot more adult.

Threads also has a huge oversupply of fragile mediocrities who love the drama and/or haven't worked out it's a terrible medium for self-promotion, and has generated some of the most jaw-droppingly stupid takes I've ever seen online.

(And I used to be on AOL...)

A good few people left Threads when the censorship started to become too obvious, and a lot more will leave when the ads become too heavy-handed.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#100

Post by philjohn »

huijzer wrote: post #56
pinoy420 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a horrific place to work. Imagine the pressure

I yesterday sat in a meeting where someone showed for an hour all kinds of organizational charts with acronyms and vague terms, and who could do what and who is the boss of who. The various organizations were there to help employees dealing with European privacy regulations while also publishing data open access when possible. Basically: Which parts of the org can help you to deal with the contradicting government re…

You get those meetings at Meta as well ... because there are re-orgs multiple times a year and so the org leadership is sent to sell their teams on how this is now the perfect org structure. Until the next one, of course.

There's a famous poster from the Facebook days - don't mistake motion for progress. I always thought they should make one for re-orgs.

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