19 ms·

Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business?

309 points by ceohockey60 7y ago

monkin 7y ago
They are in the empire business, and the best empire for them are human vegetables.
ravenstine 7y ago
With their history with their APIs and developer support, who in their right mind would trust Facebook for their cloud storage/computing?
- axegon_ 7y ago
  Not to mention privacy and data protection.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- greentrust 7y ago
  Facebook is the creator and maintainer of the most popular web framework in the world (React). This certainly doesn't mean they should do cloud computing, but let's not downplay their favor amongst developers.
  - save_ferris 7y ago
    Ubiquity of a library/framework doesn't translate to trust or favor among developers. Just look at Oracle.
    - closeparen 7y ago
      Are you referring to Java? Sun was beloved.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Oracle has a very significant cloud business: $26.7B in 2019 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/06/21/oracles-cloud-business-momentum-makes-us-revise-our-fair-value-estimate-upward/#1ce2f0b06400 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/06/21/or...
      - kube-system 7y ago
        Yes, they do, but not because developers like them. They are infamous for their super strong targeting of C-level for sales.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        The correct statement is some developers don't like Oracle. As for their business tactics, every business has to find viability in its own way. Obviously Oracle is providing services of value if they are able to consistently turn a profit on revenue in the tens of billions per year. This doesn't really answer the question why Facebook is not in the cloud business.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        > Obviously Oracle is providing services of value if they are able to consistently turn a profit on revenue in the tens of billions per year Not obvious; Oracle is known for underhanded marketing and lock-in. Or if you prefer: Successfully selling to the C-levels doesn't mean that you provide actual value.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Right, because C-level types are just spending $30B a year on Oracle services for zero value added. You shouldn't take your own opinions on a provider's services too seriously. No doubt there are some practices that are subpar but like any competitor in a crowded marketplace, there are going to be trade-offs between cloud providers. If the trade-offs between price, features, and value align with the needs of an organization, they will choose Oracle. That C-suite and devs have different needs shouldn't surprise you. There's always going to be some tension between those two groups, because their perspective on the business is filtered from a different set of parameters. That tension, by the way, will necessarily create a demand for different services and functions in the marketplace. You may not personally like Oracle, but don't pretend that some people don't, and don't imagine for one moment that it's purely out of ignorance.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    Frameworks and Infrastructure tend to get chosen by different people with different requirements though. "Move fast and break things" is okay/great if you can control the deployment of code and use tests to make sure it still works how you expect it to. It's less great if the infrastructure keeps failing (it's not failing, it's changing!) and you can't test before the roll out.
  - drannex 7y ago
    No, developers don't like React because of an infrastructure supported by Facebook. React is entirely selfhostable, and only as secure as your own dev environment. Built as an open sourced tool, with major contributions from thousands outside of FB. You can't compare the two and their safety anf 'favor among developers', devs also fought against FB by having them change their licensing bc FB made the horrendous decision to essentially own any and all projects developed on it. Devs don't trust facebook, such as no one should.
    - beardedman 7y ago
      Please don't speak for all of us. I for one think Facebook being involved with React is absolutely a good thing.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    React is a piece of code that is versioned which the developer has full control over. A cloud service would be entirely controlled by Facebook, meaning your business can be bricked by Facebook on a whim, as has happened to many Facebook-hosted apps in the past. There's a reason why few take Facebook seriously as a developer platform these days.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    Products and services have a very different risk profile. With products you generally can vet a lot of risk up-front, with services, you have more risk tied to future activities.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The same could be said about Google.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    I wouldn't trust Google either, though I'd trust Facebook even less.
barryrandall 7y ago
Short answer: they’re not at all trustworthy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Then why is Google? They have the same business model and disregard for privacy.
  - jerf 7y ago
    And how are they doing compared to AWS and Azure? Though I doubt that's the reason GCP is where it is, it doesn't really help your point.
  - jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
    Google has never been implicated in a plot to hack the U.S. presidential election. Now, I don't actually Believe that the ads displayed on facebook had any real impact on how people voted. They were never on screen for very long, and they took up a small percentage of screen space compared to all the other user and advertiser generated content. But Zuckerberg did testify before congress on live TV and that's what people are going to remember.
    - madhadron 7y ago
      Google and Twitter were targeted by the Russians as well. They just didn't go public when they found the evidence, unlike Facebook, until after Facebook did. Facebook bears the brunt in the press because it screwed over the press so much in recent years.
    - traek 7y ago
      > Google has never been implicated in a plot to hack the U.S. presidential election. Sure they have. The very same election as Facebook (and Twitter), in fact. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-russian-groups-did-use-our-ads-and-youtube-to-influence-2016-elections/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-russian-groups-did-use-...
  - deleted 7y ago
Finnucane 7y ago
Are they not storing enormous quantities of people's data in the cloud?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It doesn't sell those [edit: cloud] services to others.
  - numlock86 7y ago
    Isn't that their core service?
    - ink_13 7y ago
      No, their core service is selling ads. You can't actually buy anyone's data from Facebook, you can only buy ad targeting.
      - numlock86 7y ago
        Oh, okay. I was just confused because whenever I read something about Facebook it was about them selling everyone's data.
  - drannex 7y ago
    That's their core service, they sell your data through targeted means. That is still selling your data.
    - iscoelho 7y ago
      The only reason anyone would ever call targeted ads "selling your data" is to make people who don't fully understand it believe it's scary. Completely misrepresenting what they are doing. How about we, as a collective, say it for what it is instead of using words that mean something completely different and let people come to their own opinions instead of thinking for them? As bad as a news outlet.
dr-detroit 7y ago
Their business model is to capture most/all internet traffic not to support competitors' efforts in that space.
AznHisoka 7y ago
I think it's a mix of: 1) being too late in the game, at this stage. 2) unable to rebrand themselves as a trustworthy service for enterprises. They're stuck with the "social" and "fun" label.
enos_feedler 7y ago
The big miss for Facebook isn’t cloud computing platforms, but mobile platforms. Mark has admitted this himself when asked what his mistakes/regrets are. It was easy to miss in the context of social’s massive growth. But the dust is settling and it is clear that mobile platforms hold tremendous power over consumere.
- kube-system 7y ago
  They tried a little bit, didn't they? https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopped/ https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopp...
- scarface74 7y ago
  Facebook didn’t miss mobile. They completely repositioned themselves when it came to mobile and pivoted away from being an app platform. Mobile was the best thing that happen to them.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It was the best thing that happened to them, but also caused them to cede control to platform vendors.
  - enos_feedler 7y ago
    I think you give Facebook too much credit for repositioning themselves. Facebook and the news feed was a natural product for mobile. There was no pivot at all. They merely saw where user attention was going and built for that surface. I would argue they got off track by building for mobile "web" and thinking native APIs weren't important. Then they course corrected. But I think the miss here is that social connectivity was a new thing happening to software and they could have made a strong play to influence the direction of the mobile OS. They don't have much leverage now.
    - ahupp 7y ago
      Facebook did a huge company-wide refocus on mobile at a time when it was not at all clear smartphones were going to become the dominant platform. I really do give zuck et.al. a lot of credit for seeing that coming [source: I was an employee at the time]
pavlov 7y ago
They were. Doesn't anyone remember Parse? https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse
- s_m 7y ago
  I am kind of amazed the author didn't mention Parse once.
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
    I was exposed to Parse, but was it ever widely used/popular?
    - asciimike 7y ago
      Yes, it was a fairly popular BaaS offering during 2014-2016 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=parse-platform%2Cfirebase%2Crealm https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=parse-platfor...
    - gman83 7y ago
      It was definitely popular. It used to be the go to solution on r/AndroidDev for people wanting a simple backend solution without having much experience. Everyone switched to Google Firebase after Facebook shut it down.
    - gfosco 7y ago
      It's still actively developed. https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server
  - cameronfraser 7y ago
    Why? The discussion is about IaaS not SaaS
- bigtones 7y ago
  They still are in SaaS - with 'Workplace by Facebook' The article is referring to IaaS from my initial read. https://www.facebook.com/workplace https://www.facebook.com/workplace
somurzakov 7y ago
because selling ads is higher margin business and more profitable. they used to sell data (cambridge analytica etc) and that was also very profitable, not sure how it is now
- dewey 7y ago
  I was under the impression they ran a variety of Facebook personality quizzes and aquired the data through that against the Facebook TOS. Do you have a source for them "buying them" from Facebook?
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    This is "fake news" (I hate this term but it seems very relevant in this case). As far as I understand Cambridge Analytica used the publicly-available Facebook APIs to create a stupid web app (a personality test or similar) which asked users to log in and hand over a lot of data (both about them and about their friends). While their end-goal was against Facebook's ToS, I don't think there's anything they could've done about it ahead of time as 1) removing those APIs would hurt legitimate usage (let's say for example I am building an alternative client or similar - I want to be able to see my friends' data on there) and 2) it is still the user that is willingly giving out their and their friends' data when logging into such an app (and Facebook makes it clear what data the third-party service will be able to access when you first log in). In short it's idiots logging in and delegating their permission level (which allows them to see their friends' data) to a malicious third-party. Facebook isn't really to blame there. It's no different from someone telling me a secret and then I go around and tell it to everyone else.
- thedance 7y ago
  This is also true for Google, though. Cloud is a low-margin business compared to everything else Google sells, and the bigger cloud becomes the worse Google's quarterly reports look.
umeshunni 7y ago
They are. They sell FB Workplace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_by_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_by_Facebook https://www.workplace.com/ https://www.workplace.com/
- wmf 7y ago
  I think the article is talking about lower-level IaaS/PaaS.
blueboo 7y ago
It is. It has exactly one enormously consequential customer.
m0zg 7y ago
Because that's not what they do, and they're too late to the game. From ex-Google friends who work there, FB's own core infra lags Google's by more than a decade in many cases.
kick 7y ago
One thing I like about Facebook, evil aside, is how Zuckerberg-centric it seems. They spent two billion on Oculus because Zuckerberg liked Ready Player One and thinks the chance of that is awesome. Zuckerberg publicly released a machine learning project in college and now Facebook is spending more on machine learning than anyone. If you had effectively infinite money to make any idea you can think of into reality, would you use it building cool things that you are personally interested in, or would you use it to start another cloud company dedicated to prices so high it's practically highway robbery? It would make sense if Facebook was ran by Larry Ellison, but money is pretty pointless as an end itself.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I think you're putting too much narrative into this.
  - kick 7y ago
    I don't think so; it seems like most of Facebook's decision-making in terms of expansion is arbitrary and whim-based. He admitted to that being the reason he bought Oculus.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      It's possible that they are less focused than similar companies, but I would expect that it takes more to seal an acquisition than Mark Zuckerberg just going "let's buy that company, they look cool" and it being done.
beardedman 7y ago
They should be more.
daxfohl 7y ago
Given google is already starting down the ultimatum path, seems like there's not space in this game outside of the big two. Probably a good business move not to get involved.
- nojvek 7y ago
  I don't think the positions are set though. We'll always want more compute, storage and smarter platform that is reliable and affordable. As long as Google keeps on positioning itself as reliable and does a few things really well, they'll win those segments. They're already doing that with K8S but their recent emails about per hour pricing was just stupid. It sends a message that their VPs just don't understand what people really want.
rshnotsecure 7y ago
Facebook's data center planning team for the last several years has been steered pretty effectively by engineers from "the Seven Sons of National Defense". This is a term from the US Intelligence Community that refers to the 7 most prestigious universities in China that support the People's Liberation Army. This includes "Beinhang University" and "Northwest Polytechnical University". These schools are closer to the Army in China than say Westpoint is to the Army in the US. These schools guarantee some of the best paying jobs in all of China, and if you desire, a chance to reach the upper strata of the CCP hierarchy. For this, reasonably I think too, they expect a pretty large amount of loyalty measured in decades. They have overruled consistently (there is nothing wrong with this I am just saying there were objections often) to massive capital infrastructures that make no sense in Facebook and that has always driven the finance people wild. I don't think there is a conspiracy here. I do think that a lot of specific Chinese hardware manufacturers have gotten very very rich off of these decisions. Their architectural decisions are certainly really strange. They tripled-down on blueray DVD storage in 2009, even though massive cheap flash, then NVMe, then NVMe EVO Plus rolled out in quick succession. I recommend this report and web app from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute: https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/ https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/.
scarface74 7y ago
All of these clouds are spawned out of already-large tech companies, many of whom have built a massive technical infrastructure to support their original businesses, then turn those resources into services to rent out in the form of cloud This is a myth that’s been disputed several times by high ranking Amazon officials. Amazon never turned their internal infrastructure into AWS. It was always a completely separate initiative. Amazon was not on AWS for years. Google also only uses GCP for a few internal services.
- serioussecurity 7y ago
  Yes and no. They run on the same hardware and share a lot of the internal tools. Which is a very big lift.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    False.
    - rossjudson 7y ago
      Wrong; it's true. I work on Google Cloud Storage. There are multiple layers of sharing at varying depths. The externally visible APIs to cloud storage are the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is very, very deep.
      - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
        The part about AWS is false.
- skybrian 7y ago
  That's the software level though. Further down the stack, things like hardware designs, hardware purchasing, and maintenance can be shared.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Assuming the basic assumptions hold. Google for example doesn’t really care much if individual searches are slightly less accurate so low data center temperatures should be less important for them than say a financial institution. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-computer-memory-flakier-than-expected/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-computer-memory-flakier-tha... Facebook’s hardware designs might generalize well, but perhaps not.
diyseguy 7y ago
I have a similar question - why is Amazon not in the ad business?
- jmknoll 7y ago
  They very much are. Amazon's advertising business made $14 billion last year https://marketingland.com/amazons-booming-ad-business-grew-by-40-in-2019-275312 https://marketingland.com/amazons-booming-ad-business-grew-b...
  - tasssko 7y ago
    The question should be what business isn’t Amazon in!
  - diyseguy 7y ago
    I guess I meant the web advertising business. Since they are the premier site hosting service, the dream would be to launch a site and have it pay for itself with ads, but they haven't gone there for some reason.
- daxfohl 7y ago
  Or search. Seems like they could give Google a run. I'd assume they have the infra and the expertise. I'd also assume someone there has already had that idea and run the numbers and decided against it. Maybe they have a gentleman's agreement with Google that they won't compete and Google will reduce their ad rates.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    They already do give Google a major run for their money in probably the most important search category - product search, where they have a 54 percent market share. That's the most ad friendly category - people looking to buy stuff! When you want to buy something - how often do you type it into Google, versus go to Amazon and type it into their search bar? I really doubt there's a gentlemans agreement - bezos does not seem like that kind of guy, and they are really causing a lot of pain for Google eating into what should be one of their most profitable advertising streams. https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/08/01/amazon-google-market-share/ https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/08/01/amazon-google-m...
niftich 7y ago
While they have competent infrastructure, an IaaS offering needs a platform whose capabilities are more complex than one where you're running only first-party applications. And even if they spent the time and effort, they'd be entering a commoditified, crowded field. All the big players can run servers, the value-add is from SaaS and/or surrounding PaaS, the latter of which they'd have to build from scratch. Their previous forays into PaaS, done at a time when Twitter was also in this space, have faltered. And Facebook's pre-existing services are too far up the stack to be relevant to any IaaS ambition. I doubt the 'trust issues' contribute significantly in Facebook's decision to not offer this, but I agree they'd be a factor for potential customers once the offering came to be. Facebook's branding is odd in that they've doubled down on the Facebook brand despite acquiring services that flourished in part for being "not Facebook". They seem resistant to rebrand into a holding company, and their choice supports the view that the company's tech mission is to remain tightly coupled with their flagship social network.
tekkk 7y ago
Without first-mover advantage, without the enterprise sales network it would be just foolish for FB to waste their time and energy on such highly competitive field without much of natural advantages. You don't really synergize social media with cloud infra. And they know it too, so they rather compete in fields where they are good at, namely social media and apps. Maybe its part laziness, part lack of interest on their part too. But to me it would be wiser to focus on some promising new areas, rather than start catching up 2 laps behind the competition. Yet it's not easy, like VR/AR market shows. Maybe in ML services they could challenge Google a little more.
- ljm 7y ago
  I'm not sure many people would be keen on deploying their entire cloud on Facebook either. Forget about privacy concerns and all that, it just doesn't make sense when they have the 'move fast and break things' philosophy. The last thing you want in high availability cloud infra is a team of engineers who will sacrifice stability for innovation. Even if they did do it, there's not a chance they could launch it under 'Facebook'.
  - throwaway894345 7y ago
    Do they have a "move fast and break things" philosophy in 2020? I know they did a decade ago, but is that still true today? Further, does that philosophy apply to their core infrastructure, or just leaf-node feature development? Is there any indication that Facebook's cloud infra team sacrifices stability for innovation? When was the last time Facebook had a major outage that was traced to some core service? How does their infra track record stack up to AWS (I'm a happy AWS customer, but their infrastructure flakes on us in a major way several times per year)?
    - thatfunkymunki 7y ago
      "move fast with stable infrastructure" is the current phrase
- throwaway894345 7y ago
beardedman 7y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually did enter. I don't use FB personally, but I'm a big fan of the OSS efforts. > biggest hurdle is trust, given its problematic record on data privacy It is? FB is a corporation - much like Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon. Each of those have had their fair share of issues throughout the years. Too easy to be polarised with stuff like this. FB produced good tech and supports it too - which is more than I can say for Google. But I'll use Google for their search & docs products, which is top notch. There are no heroes/villains.
- fenwick67 7y ago
  Google and Facebook have particularly not-great privacy reputations because they are advertising companies whose business models are precluded on collecting your personal info.
  - alharith 7y ago
    You don't have to have your business model be advertising in order to be shitty at privacy.
    - fenwick67 7y ago
      (...but it probably helps)
      - alharith 7y ago
        Counterintuitively, you are more likely to be better at privacy if you are in the business of selling data, especially in the current regulatory climate. The websites that have been the worst at maintaining my privacy were those that primarily sold physical products or medical services. You'd be amazed how many organizations broker data now.
  - beardedman 7y ago
    Which people offer freely.
not2b 7y ago
You make money if you are the #1 or #2 player in a market. If you are more like #4, you will just lose money. If Facebook tried to enter the cloud market today, they would be way behind. Without a unique advantage that would induce customers to switch, why would anyone switch? And if they tried to compete by cutting prices they would just lose money.
- caymanjim 7y ago
  I agree with your statement, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. AWS is dominant, but their software/tools are horrendous. Their web admin UI looks, feels, and has the general usability of some horrible Java enterprise tool designed by a committee of Windows developers in the mid-00s, because that's exactly what it is. I don't know how Azure and GCloud compare, but they cannot possibly be worse. AWS does what people need, but I don't know anyone who likes working with it. Except maybe Windows admins from the 00s.
  - b34r 7y ago
    Gcloud’s interface is significantly better
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    Agreed, I feel like AWS has the worst UI of them all, followed by Azure's Metro/Visual Studio-style UI and then GCP is OK on the UI front, but lacks when it comes to monitoring and configuration options for things like CloudSQL for example.
    - aeyes 7y ago
      AWS is all about the API, some services don't even have a UI. Once you start using the API AWS is the best option out there.
      - AsyncAwait 7y ago
        I did hear that, but sometimes is nice do do things from the UI, especially when testing new services.
amelius 7y ago
Commoditize your complement.
tinyhouse 7y ago
Why every large company needs to be in every business?
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Every large company has certain dependencies (compute, networking, and storage in this case, although you could argue for ex. food service, HR, maybe financial tooling), and those dependencies entail cost and risk, with more risk from using external vendors. So eventually, big enough companies build their own. They build their own datacenters, write their own provisioning tools, design their own network setups, flesh out their own HR departments. And then they look at it and say, "hey, if we can safely sell this, we can recoup the costs of building it, and maybe turn a profit." And if their system is general enough, and they can deal with security well enough, then usually they do just that. Compute is easy to rent out. Networks require some work for security but it's quite doable. HR tends to be too specialized and/or sensitive to resell. (But not always, and sometimes you do see companies reselling employee portals and whatnot.)
kabapadum 7y ago
It is. For some of the partners, they do provide a cloud solution and at much reduced price compared to AWS. ps: i think it will be public cloud someday
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Woah. Got more info on this?
  - kabapadum 7y ago
    Unfortunately not, Our monthly spending on AWS was more then 5m$ when 7 months ago we were contacted and offered to try their solution.
daxfohl 7y ago
Based on what would they expect to win business, from whom? Could they do it at lower cost? Probably not. Do they have any technology that leapfrogs the others? Not aware of any. Do they have good business relationships for this sort of thing? No. So what else is there?
efsavage 7y ago
I worked at FB, and I think they would probably do OK if they entered the space as they are very smart about physical infrastructure, but the most plausible explanation I heard from an executive (forget which one) when asked this was that they are already building out at a very fast clip, and feel that they can make a better ROI by using that infrastructure themselves rather than renting it out.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  Matches my experience - was very much a "sure, we could do that, but it's not our core competency or the best use of our resources"
- basch 7y ago
  Right now facebook has a couple options when a new network emerges. Buy the competitor, clone the competitor, ignore them, compete with a not completely similar product. Why not another option, like "take a percentage of their profit in exchange for service." I dont think it should be looked at as just as direct ROI, but also as a hedge against future obsolescence. Its a better position to be in, to be the ocean, if everybody wakes up one day and jumps ship. Visa and Microsoft make a ton of money being a grease or tax on other business, a small shaving of money in exchange for massive efficiency, instead of trying to BE every business. Is anyone offering an out of the box Social Graph as a Service kit? It would also be a huge growth opportunity for Facebook Ad Services, to be THE ad marketplace of all new social networks. And in a play right out of Adobe's playbook, buying some things like bigcommerce, ecommdash, shiptstation would position them to sell underlying services that allow their customers to compete directly with amazon, ebay, adobe, salesforce. There is surely a lot more money they could make selling saas and pass, vs becoming another generic iaas provider. https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-opportunity-02-03 https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868341
- mgiampapa 7y ago
  Zuck has said as much at all hands meetings. If the growth knobs were turned off across all it's products and spare capacity became a thing, then it might make sense, but at the rate they are building there is no purpose to being a middle man. Make a code optimization and save 1-2% of CPU on the web tier and you will be a hero.
jedberg 7y ago
They may still get into the business, and it would make sense for them to do so, and may even solve their privacy problem while they are at it. Amazon did it a long time ago, and when they started, they had no sales team. They had to build that capability slowly over time, but they had the first mover advantage, so they had time to learn. Now they are number one. Microsoft already had the enterprise sales team, they had to learn how to sell cloud. They had some trouble with the shift, and with the technology, but now they are knocking it out of the park, and are solidly in the number two spot behind Amazon. Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep growing. This is the position Facebook would be in. They probably have the technology, or can at least attract the necessary talent to build it (I know that I would at least listen if they said, “Come build a new cloud with us from the ground up”). But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google. Now, in Google’s defense, they have realized they are coming from behind, and as such have focused on selling their higher level services. If you want to do AI and Machine Learning, Google’s cloud is the place to do it! And then maybe while you’re there, if your core business is AI, maybe you’ll use some of their other services as well, since your data is already there. Facebook could make a similar play. They could build a cloud and then require any 3rd party apps that work with Facebook to use their cloud. This would jumpstart their adoption, and could potentially help them solve their privacy issues. They could require that you never send any personal Facebook data out of their cloud, and could closely monitor all the outbound traffic. Then they could theoretically allow even more access to Facebook data, if they knew they could control what happens to that data after the 3rd party gets hold of it. In other words they could launch a cloud that lets you run your 3rd party Facebook apps in a controlled and audited way, and even give you building blocks to do it quickly and efficiently. It would boost their bottom line, because there is good margins in compute and storage, and at the same time give them more control of their own data.
- dilyevsky 7y ago
  Google didn’t have sales team? Uh who do you think selling all those ads?
holler 7y ago
I’ve honestly asked this question multiple times to people. FB made a mistake not doing this 10+ years ago. Feels too late now. What can they offer that isn’t available already?
m_ke 7y ago
I’d like to know why they’re not in the search business. They have enough signal from their platforms to offer great personalized search results and it would allow them to grow their ad revenue with intent based ads.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  The same reason why Apple is not in the search business even though search is a key part of the phone experience: someone else does the job really well. Facebook would need a way to differentiate the search experience. I don't think personalization is enough since Google personalizes too. I also don't think a company should build products for the _purpose_ of revenue. Revenue is the output of building a great product with a purpose for users. So I think it goes back to Facebook asking what unique purpose would it provide in it's search experience?
  - m_ke 7y ago
    Facebook should get into the search business for the same reason that Apple is getting into the software subscription business, it's an obvious way to grow their business. Facebook already has the analytics in place from their share buttons, ad platform and user engagement on the feed to create a great ranking system. A lot of people already use instagram to search for restaurants, fashion, travel and products, same goes for facebook marketplace and business pages, all they'd need to do is expand the search bars in their apps to include web results. Tracking search queries would give them true intent data that they could use to improve their ad targeting across their whole ad platform. The only thing google has on facebook right now is the ability to let advertisers target search queries. (just did a google search and it looks like they're starting to add that option: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/reach-people-who-are-actively-shopping-with-ads-in-facebook-search-results https://www.facebook.com/business/news/reach-people-who-are-...)
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Because why would you use it over Google? That's a lot of effort to build and launch a likely poorly differentiated service that they'd need to spend a lot of money on to steal users from Google. Why would a user prefer Facebook to Google for search?
zapttt 7y ago
because everyone there was hired from yahoo and other "portals". really. those folks have a natural tendency to fatten the middle management layer and focus on buzzwords that shake the core business (mobile! vr!) and feature creeping until the product is so broken it dies. all while killing the few trully tech/innovative teams.
ksec 7y ago
>The global public cloud computing spending was $229 billion in 2019 and will grow to $500 billion in 2023, according to IDC. So I decided to check on the article itself [1]. >"Adoption of public (shared) cloud services continues to grow rapidly as enterprises, especially in professional services, telecommunications, and retail...... Basically what IDC labels as cloud isn't what is being discussed in the blog, or in the HN comment section which is pretty much strictly IaaS business. The cloud from IDC includes SaaS. Things like ERP and CRM. And they even said this >Software as a Service (SaaS) will be the largest category of cloud computing, capturing more than half of all public cloud spending in throughout the forecast. SaaS spending, Which basically makes the blog and ~60 comments on HN so far irrelevant. The absolute vast majority of growth are going into SaaS, aka Microsoft's Exchange, Dynamic 365, Office 365, SalesForce etc.... What about IaaS? >IaaS...., will also be the fastest growing category of cloud spending with a five-year CAGR of 32.0%. That is great. Until you look at the number closely, >China will experience the fastest growth in public cloud services spending over the five-year forecast period with a 49.1% CAGR. Latin America will also deliver strong public cloud spending growth with a 38.3% CAGR. What that means is that the CAGR, while impressive, will mostly be focused on market that are not current well served, China, India, Latin America, South East Asia. Of Course Europe and NA are also growing, but likely at a comparatively lower pace. All these are 3 years from now, a very short period of time in terms of infrastructure building. Is this far too late in the Game for Facebook? Do they have a long terms sustainability plan? As we have been shown again and again, Enterprise Tech moves very slowly and tends to stick with big brand or long time partners. One can look at Google Vs Microsoft as example. It seems the money right now is on HPC, AI, Scientific Computing, Deep Learning, all these seems to have infinite appetite of computation power that even with 1.4nm by 2026 the performance still would not have satisfy needs. But what about normal Web Server usage? Are we close to its peak? The growth in Cloud is partly ( or mostly ) driven by Smartphone, the world went from 1.5 billion internet user using it during free time to near 5 billion user using it All the time. Smartphone sales, and user growth has slow down, IaaS usually being lagging behind in supply, are we nearing the end of the growth curve? ( Excluding Scientific Computing Needs ) Remember a lot of these are talking in Dollar terms, 3 years from now the same dollar should have bought you 50% more computational power. And that is excluding any possible disruption from ARM. [1] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45340719 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45340719
KaiserPro 7y ago
Here are a few reasons: 1) its hard to do well and still be profitable. 2) It would require a massive internal shift, The security tools internally for doing things like IAMs are far to primitive. It would take years to re-tool, stopping momentum on products that make money 3) its not where Zuckerberg see facebook in the future. That future is AR/VR. Google stumbled with AR, It's structure means that any AR will eat at the mobile buisness. Apple might make a splash, but its unlikely that they will be first to market. Which leaves a whole segment for facebook to dominate, if it makes a decent product, and tackles it's image.
- nojvek 7y ago
  Apple just unveiled an ipad with lidar sensors. I would say Apple is poised to make the biggest impact since they can make the most phenomenal mass market hardware and well designed software to go with it. AR/VR will still take a while to be mass market. We need a lot more compute, better algorithms and hardware.
seshagiric 7y ago
I heard they are very passionate in aligning to their mission - empowering people to form community and brining world together. How does entering into Cloud Business align to the company mission? Wouldn't it be a distraction?
- viklove 7y ago
  I think you misspelled "spying on users and selling data/ads."
  - nojvek 7y ago
    Well both Google and FB have some sort of vague bullshit mission statements. What matters at the end of day is growth and how wallstreet sees them. That's how they measure themselves. Facebook more-so than it's peers "Growth at any cost".
surferbayarea 7y ago
Their history and relationship with the developer community has been contentious - facebook apps, parse, WhatsApp bot, etc etc
boynamedsue 7y ago
The fundamental question is this: Would Facebook have any credibility with enterprises? My sense: No.
hudvin 7y ago
Yes, why not to sell data from dbs, backups, drives? :D
RivieraKid 7y ago
It's now a competitive, commoditized market. They would probably make more money by buying S&P 500. (How is this not obvious to the author?)
nikhilsimha 7y ago
Used to work at fb in an infra team. Their abstraction for job scheduling (Tupperware) is about 5 years behind - something like Borg or EC2/EMR. Something like that is a fundamental reason why fb can’t do cloud as it is right now. Plus, the infra teams do operate like product - impact at all costs. Which to most management translates to short-term impact over technical quality. It would be a true 180 in terms of eng culture if they could pull off a cloud platform. An example is how they bought Parse and killed it, while firebase at google is doing extremely well. Having said all that, I think focusing on impact over technical quality is probably the right business decision for what they were trying to do at the time - drive engagement and revenue.
- thedance 7y ago
  When you say that Tupperware is 5 years behind Borg, what do you mean? It would take 5 years to add current Borg features? It lacks features Borg had 5 years ago? Or it would take 5 years to reach parity with Borg as launched, i.e. it's actually 17+ years behind?
  - justicezyx 7y ago
    The last statement is factually wrong. Borg was launched 2005, 5 years behind would be 20 years.
- ipsum2 7y ago
  I think 5 years behind may be an exaggeration. People can read https://engineering.fb.com/data-center-engineering/tupperware/ https://engineering.fb.com/data-center-engineering/tupperwar... and make up their own mind.
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    5 years might actually be right on the mark? I think Borg and EC2 et al. had all of this functionality 5 years ago, but I'm not sure it was all there more than 5 years ago.
- deleted 7y ago
mesozoic 7y ago
Not exactly on the cutting edge of tech from what I hear.
tanilama 7y ago
I don't think the author understands why/how Cloud business works. Software is just part of it. It is a logistics problem fundamentally. And Amazon is not only a software shop, it is also the most advanced logistics company in US, both physically and virtually, and those two go hand-in-hand. So no, I don't think FB can get into Cloud business anytime soon, and I also doubt they have that much of the cash to actually expand the business, it is going to be huge investment, globally. The market right now is not going to be forgiving to new comers. Disclaimer: ex-AWS employee
herostratus101 7y ago
> The tougher part is perhaps not technical, but human. Facebook will have to build out an enterprise sales and support team that is culturally and operationally very different from running an ad-supported social network. Google, also a primarily ad-supported company, suffered from this “identity crisis” and is still trying to catch up to AWS and Azure, despite offering what many believe is a superior technical product. Who on earth believes that GCP is in the same universe as even Azure, let alone AWS?
stopachka 7y ago
(Former FB Eng) The main reason is because it doesn't align with FB's values. How is building a cloud business going to connect the world? (As fluffy as this sounds, mission was taken seriously -- all the way up to Schrep)
- bor100003 7y ago
  How do the Libra crypto connect the world? No sarcasm here.
  - baby 7y ago
    It allows anyone around the world to send and receive money instantly and at low cost.
  - lmm 7y ago
    Having an easy way to send money around the world without having to worry about which currency it should be in would be a huge help for some communities. A lot of artistic/creative groups work on a kind of semi-gift-economy model where everyone buys everyone else's stuff, not quite as an arms-length market-value transaction but as a semi-social interaction where you buy things from the people you hang out with online at what's probably more than a "fair" price. Having something like Patreon but less US-specific and more closely integrated with social media (admittedly Patreon's integration with Discord is starting to fill that gap) would genuinely help.
justinholmes 7y ago
I don't understand why Facebook doesn't offer there developer machine provisioning to the outside world. They have the talent to build VPCs on top of SDN.
hyperpower 7y ago
Related: I explored Facebook's physical network in https://nullset.xyz/2020/02/28/exploring-facebooks-network/ https://nullset.xyz/2020/02/28/exploring-facebooks-network/.
ycmimi 7y ago
I liked Parse.
dreamer77 7y ago
I am more interested into why Netflix isn't in the cloud business. They have developed so much for infrastructure robustness with Chaos Monkey and the like.
- hintymad 7y ago
  Because Netflix is razor-sharp focused on their core business? Speaking of their infra, Netflix focuses on productivity, based on a fundamental value that everyone inside the company has freedom and responsibility. This culture empowers the engineers there to build amazing tools that make employees very happy, but in the meantime the stacks they built may not be suitable for serving individual enterprise customers. For instance, they certainly don't fully use the elaborate security infrastructure that AWS offers. They don't worry too much about being frugal, either. Remember the famous saying that "Netflix is a log company that happens to stream movies"? They do store everything, at the cost of millions of dollars. Their monitoring system is so easy to use and so expressive, that it blows out any known monitoring systems out of water, but in the meantime it requires thousands of machines (amazingly, it used to be only 4 engineers manning the whole stack. A perfect example that shows how much productivity good systems can bring to engineers). So, yeah, great company and great stacks, but it does not mean they can compete in enterprise cloud business.
deleted 7y ago
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HenriTEL 7y ago
First section is misleading, cassandra, react, pytoch are not cloud tech. The cloud is what you may need to run and scale those technologies. What cluster management software did facebook open-sourced ? I don't see any. Maybe they use existing open-sourced techs.
nojvek 7y ago
Cloud is a high volume, low margin business. Ads are a high margin business. When looking at FB vs AppMicroAmaGoog financials, Facebook has the highest % profit. They also make the most per employee. Plus they are the king of social networks with Insta & Whatsapp as their brands. What works against them is Facebook doesn't have a great reputation with developers, so even if they step into cloud, it will be very hard. Plus corporations will always be worried that Facebook will peek into their usage and power their ads engine.

309 points by ceohockey60 7y ago

They are in the empire business, and the best empire for them are human vegetables.

With their history with their APIs and developer support, who in their right mind would trust Facebook for their cloud storage/computing?

axegon_ 7y ago
Not to mention privacy and data protection.
deleted 7y ago
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greentrust 7y ago
Facebook is the creator and maintainer of the most popular web framework in the world (React). This certainly doesn't mean they should do cloud computing, but let's not downplay their favor amongst developers.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  Ubiquity of a library/framework doesn't translate to trust or favor among developers. Just look at Oracle.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    Are you referring to Java? Sun was beloved.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Oracle has a very significant cloud business: $26.7B in 2019 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/06/21/oracles-cloud-business-momentum-makes-us-revise-our-fair-value-estimate-upward/#1ce2f0b06400 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/06/21/or...
    - kube-system 7y ago
      Yes, they do, but not because developers like them. They are infamous for their super strong targeting of C-level for sales.
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        The correct statement is some developers don't like Oracle. As for their business tactics, every business has to find viability in its own way. Obviously Oracle is providing services of value if they are able to consistently turn a profit on revenue in the tens of billions per year. This doesn't really answer the question why Facebook is not in the cloud business.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        > Obviously Oracle is providing services of value if they are able to consistently turn a profit on revenue in the tens of billions per year Not obvious; Oracle is known for underhanded marketing and lock-in. Or if you prefer: Successfully selling to the C-levels doesn't mean that you provide actual value.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Right, because C-level types are just spending $30B a year on Oracle services for zero value added. You shouldn't take your own opinions on a provider's services too seriously. No doubt there are some practices that are subpar but like any competitor in a crowded marketplace, there are going to be trade-offs between cloud providers. If the trade-offs between price, features, and value align with the needs of an organization, they will choose Oracle. That C-suite and devs have different needs shouldn't surprise you. There's always going to be some tension between those two groups, because their perspective on the business is filtered from a different set of parameters. That tension, by the way, will necessarily create a demand for different services and functions in the marketplace. You may not personally like Oracle, but don't pretend that some people don't, and don't imagine for one moment that it's purely out of ignorance.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Frameworks and Infrastructure tend to get chosen by different people with different requirements though. "Move fast and break things" is okay/great if you can control the deployment of code and use tests to make sure it still works how you expect it to. It's less great if the infrastructure keeps failing (it's not failing, it's changing!) and you can't test before the roll out.
- drannex 7y ago
  No, developers don't like React because of an infrastructure supported by Facebook. React is entirely selfhostable, and only as secure as your own dev environment. Built as an open sourced tool, with major contributions from thousands outside of FB. You can't compare the two and their safety anf 'favor among developers', devs also fought against FB by having them change their licensing bc FB made the horrendous decision to essentially own any and all projects developed on it. Devs don't trust facebook, such as no one should.
  - beardedman 7y ago
    Please don't speak for all of us. I for one think Facebook being involved with React is absolutely a good thing.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  React is a piece of code that is versioned which the developer has full control over. A cloud service would be entirely controlled by Facebook, meaning your business can be bricked by Facebook on a whim, as has happened to many Facebook-hosted apps in the past. There's a reason why few take Facebook seriously as a developer platform these days.
- kube-system 7y ago
  Products and services have a very different risk profile. With products you generally can vet a lot of risk up-front, with services, you have more risk tied to future activities.
scarface74 7y ago
The same could be said about Google.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I wouldn't trust Google either, though I'd trust Facebook even less.

barryrandall 7y ago

Short answer: they’re not at all trustworthy.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
Then why is Google? They have the same business model and disregard for privacy.
- jerf 7y ago
  And how are they doing compared to AWS and Azure? Though I doubt that's the reason GCP is where it is, it doesn't really help your point.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
  Google has never been implicated in a plot to hack the U.S. presidential election. Now, I don't actually Believe that the ads displayed on facebook had any real impact on how people voted. They were never on screen for very long, and they took up a small percentage of screen space compared to all the other user and advertiser generated content. But Zuckerberg did testify before congress on live TV and that's what people are going to remember.
  - madhadron 7y ago
    Google and Twitter were targeted by the Russians as well. They just didn't go public when they found the evidence, unlike Facebook, until after Facebook did. Facebook bears the brunt in the press because it screwed over the press so much in recent years.
  - traek 7y ago
    > Google has never been implicated in a plot to hack the U.S. presidential election. Sure they have. The very same election as Facebook (and Twitter), in fact. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-russian-groups-did-use-our-ads-and-youtube-to-influence-2016-elections/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-russian-groups-did-use-...
- deleted 7y ago

Finnucane 7y ago

Are they not storing enormous quantities of people's data in the cloud?

saagarjha 7y ago
It doesn't sell those [edit: cloud] services to others.
- numlock86 7y ago
  Isn't that their core service?
  - ink_13 7y ago
    No, their core service is selling ads. You can't actually buy anyone's data from Facebook, you can only buy ad targeting.
    - numlock86 7y ago
      Oh, okay. I was just confused because whenever I read something about Facebook it was about them selling everyone's data.
- drannex 7y ago
  That's their core service, they sell your data through targeted means. That is still selling your data.
  - iscoelho 7y ago
    The only reason anyone would ever call targeted ads "selling your data" is to make people who don't fully understand it believe it's scary. Completely misrepresenting what they are doing. How about we, as a collective, say it for what it is instead of using words that mean something completely different and let people come to their own opinions instead of thinking for them? As bad as a news outlet.

dr-detroit 7y ago

Their business model is to capture most/all internet traffic not to support competitors' efforts in that space.

AznHisoka 7y ago

I think it's a mix of: 1) being too late in the game, at this stage. 2) unable to rebrand themselves as a trustworthy service for enterprises. They're stuck with the "social" and "fun" label.

enos_feedler 7y ago

The big miss for Facebook isn’t cloud computing platforms, but mobile platforms. Mark has admitted this himself when asked what his mistakes/regrets are. It was easy to miss in the context of social’s massive growth. But the dust is settling and it is clear that mobile platforms hold tremendous power over consumere.

kube-system 7y ago
They tried a little bit, didn't they? https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopped/ https://www.cnet.com/news/heres-why-the-facebook-phone-flopp...
scarface74 7y ago
Facebook didn’t miss mobile. They completely repositioned themselves when it came to mobile and pivoted away from being an app platform. Mobile was the best thing that happen to them.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It was the best thing that happened to them, but also caused them to cede control to platform vendors.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  I think you give Facebook too much credit for repositioning themselves. Facebook and the news feed was a natural product for mobile. There was no pivot at all. They merely saw where user attention was going and built for that surface. I would argue they got off track by building for mobile "web" and thinking native APIs weren't important. Then they course corrected. But I think the miss here is that social connectivity was a new thing happening to software and they could have made a strong play to influence the direction of the mobile OS. They don't have much leverage now.
  - ahupp 7y ago
    Facebook did a huge company-wide refocus on mobile at a time when it was not at all clear smartphones were going to become the dominant platform. I really do give zuck et.al. a lot of credit for seeing that coming [source: I was an employee at the time]

pavlov 7y ago

They were. Doesn't anyone remember Parse? https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse

s_m 7y ago
I am kind of amazed the author didn't mention Parse once.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  I was exposed to Parse, but was it ever widely used/popular?
  - asciimike 7y ago
    Yes, it was a fairly popular BaaS offering during 2014-2016 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=parse-platform%2Cfirebase%2Crealm https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=parse-platfor...
  - gman83 7y ago
    It was definitely popular. It used to be the go to solution on r/AndroidDev for people wanting a simple backend solution without having much experience. Everyone switched to Google Firebase after Facebook shut it down.
  - gfosco 7y ago
    It's still actively developed. https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server
- cameronfraser 7y ago
  Why? The discussion is about IaaS not SaaS
bigtones 7y ago
They still are in SaaS - with 'Workplace by Facebook' The article is referring to IaaS from my initial read. https://www.facebook.com/workplace https://www.facebook.com/workplace

somurzakov 7y ago

because selling ads is higher margin business and more profitable. they used to sell data (cambridge analytica etc) and that was also very profitable, not sure how it is now

dewey 7y ago
I was under the impression they ran a variety of Facebook personality quizzes and aquired the data through that against the Facebook TOS. Do you have a source for them "buying them" from Facebook?
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  This is "fake news" (I hate this term but it seems very relevant in this case). As far as I understand Cambridge Analytica used the publicly-available Facebook APIs to create a stupid web app (a personality test or similar) which asked users to log in and hand over a lot of data (both about them and about their friends). While their end-goal was against Facebook's ToS, I don't think there's anything they could've done about it ahead of time as 1) removing those APIs would hurt legitimate usage (let's say for example I am building an alternative client or similar - I want to be able to see my friends' data on there) and 2) it is still the user that is willingly giving out their and their friends' data when logging into such an app (and Facebook makes it clear what data the third-party service will be able to access when you first log in). In short it's idiots logging in and delegating their permission level (which allows them to see their friends' data) to a malicious third-party. Facebook isn't really to blame there. It's no different from someone telling me a secret and then I go around and tell it to everyone else.
thedance 7y ago
This is also true for Google, though. Cloud is a low-margin business compared to everything else Google sells, and the bigger cloud becomes the worse Google's quarterly reports look.

umeshunni 7y ago

They are. They sell FB Workplace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_by_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_by_Facebook https://www.workplace.com/ https://www.workplace.com/

wmf 7y ago
I think the article is talking about lower-level IaaS/PaaS.

blueboo 7y ago

It is. It has exactly one enormously consequential customer.

m0zg 7y ago

Because that's not what they do, and they're too late to the game. From ex-Google friends who work there, FB's own core infra lags Google's by more than a decade in many cases.

kick 7y ago

One thing I like about Facebook, evil aside, is how Zuckerberg-centric it seems. They spent two billion on Oculus because Zuckerberg liked Ready Player One and thinks the chance of that is awesome. Zuckerberg publicly released a machine learning project in college and now Facebook is spending more on machine learning than anyone. If you had effectively infinite money to make any idea you can think of into reality, would you use it building cool things that you are personally interested in, or would you use it to start another cloud company dedicated to prices so high it's practically highway robbery? It would make sense if Facebook was ran by Larry Ellison, but money is pretty pointless as an end itself.

saagarjha 7y ago
I think you're putting too much narrative into this.
- kick 7y ago
  I don't think so; it seems like most of Facebook's decision-making in terms of expansion is arbitrary and whim-based. He admitted to that being the reason he bought Oculus.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It's possible that they are less focused than similar companies, but I would expect that it takes more to seal an acquisition than Mark Zuckerberg just going "let's buy that company, they look cool" and it being done.

beardedman 7y ago

They should be more.

daxfohl 7y ago

Given google is already starting down the ultimatum path, seems like there's not space in this game outside of the big two. Probably a good business move not to get involved.

nojvek 7y ago
I don't think the positions are set though. We'll always want more compute, storage and smarter platform that is reliable and affordable. As long as Google keeps on positioning itself as reliable and does a few things really well, they'll win those segments. They're already doing that with K8S but their recent emails about per hour pricing was just stupid. It sends a message that their VPs just don't understand what people really want.

rshnotsecure 7y ago

Facebook's data center planning team for the last several years has been steered pretty effectively by engineers from "the Seven Sons of National Defense". This is a term from the US Intelligence Community that refers to the 7 most prestigious universities in China that support the People's Liberation Army. This includes "Beinhang University" and "Northwest Polytechnical University". These schools are closer to the Army in China than say Westpoint is to the Army in the US. These schools guarantee some of the best paying jobs in all of China, and if you desire, a chance to reach the upper strata of the CCP hierarchy. For this, reasonably I think too, they expect a pretty large amount of loyalty measured in decades. They have overruled consistently (there is nothing wrong with this I am just saying there were objections often) to massive capital infrastructures that make no sense in Facebook and that has always driven the finance people wild. I don't think there is a conspiracy here. I do think that a lot of specific Chinese hardware manufacturers have gotten very very rich off of these decisions. Their architectural decisions are certainly really strange. They tripled-down on blueray DVD storage in 2009, even though massive cheap flash, then NVMe, then NVMe EVO Plus rolled out in quick succession. I recommend this report and web app from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute: https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/ https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/.

scarface74 7y ago

All of these clouds are spawned out of already-large tech companies, many of whom have built a massive technical infrastructure to support their original businesses, then turn those resources into services to rent out in the form of cloud This is a myth that’s been disputed several times by high ranking Amazon officials. Amazon never turned their internal infrastructure into AWS. It was always a completely separate initiative. Amazon was not on AWS for years. Google also only uses GCP for a few internal services.

serioussecurity 7y ago
Yes and no. They run on the same hardware and share a lot of the internal tools. Which is a very big lift.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  False.
  - rossjudson 7y ago
    Wrong; it's true. I work on Google Cloud Storage. There are multiple layers of sharing at varying depths. The externally visible APIs to cloud storage are the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is very, very deep.
    - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
      The part about AWS is false.
skybrian 7y ago
That's the software level though. Further down the stack, things like hardware designs, hardware purchasing, and maintenance can be shared.
- Retric 7y ago
  Assuming the basic assumptions hold. Google for example doesn’t really care much if individual searches are slightly less accurate so low data center temperatures should be less important for them than say a financial institution. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-computer-memory-flakier-than-expected/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-computer-memory-flakier-tha... Facebook’s hardware designs might generalize well, but perhaps not.

diyseguy 7y ago

I have a similar question - why is Amazon not in the ad business?

jmknoll 7y ago
They very much are. Amazon's advertising business made $14 billion last year https://marketingland.com/amazons-booming-ad-business-grew-by-40-in-2019-275312 https://marketingland.com/amazons-booming-ad-business-grew-b...
- tasssko 7y ago
  The question should be what business isn’t Amazon in!
- diyseguy 7y ago
  I guess I meant the web advertising business. Since they are the premier site hosting service, the dream would be to launch a site and have it pay for itself with ads, but they haven't gone there for some reason.
daxfohl 7y ago
Or search. Seems like they could give Google a run. I'd assume they have the infra and the expertise. I'd also assume someone there has already had that idea and run the numbers and decided against it. Maybe they have a gentleman's agreement with Google that they won't compete and Google will reduce their ad rates.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  They already do give Google a major run for their money in probably the most important search category - product search, where they have a 54 percent market share. That's the most ad friendly category - people looking to buy stuff! When you want to buy something - how often do you type it into Google, versus go to Amazon and type it into their search bar? I really doubt there's a gentlemans agreement - bezos does not seem like that kind of guy, and they are really causing a lot of pain for Google eating into what should be one of their most profitable advertising streams. https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/08/01/amazon-google-market-share/ https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/08/01/amazon-google-m...

niftich 7y ago

While they have competent infrastructure, an IaaS offering needs a platform whose capabilities are more complex than one where you're running only first-party applications. And even if they spent the time and effort, they'd be entering a commoditified, crowded field. All the big players can run servers, the value-add is from SaaS and/or surrounding PaaS, the latter of which they'd have to build from scratch. Their previous forays into PaaS, done at a time when Twitter was also in this space, have faltered. And Facebook's pre-existing services are too far up the stack to be relevant to any IaaS ambition. I doubt the 'trust issues' contribute significantly in Facebook's decision to not offer this, but I agree they'd be a factor for potential customers once the offering came to be. Facebook's branding is odd in that they've doubled down on the Facebook brand despite acquiring services that flourished in part for being "not Facebook". They seem resistant to rebrand into a holding company, and their choice supports the view that the company's tech mission is to remain tightly coupled with their flagship social network.

tekkk 7y ago

Without first-mover advantage, without the enterprise sales network it would be just foolish for FB to waste their time and energy on such highly competitive field without much of natural advantages. You don't really synergize social media with cloud infra. And they know it too, so they rather compete in fields where they are good at, namely social media and apps. Maybe its part laziness, part lack of interest on their part too. But to me it would be wiser to focus on some promising new areas, rather than start catching up 2 laps behind the competition. Yet it's not easy, like VR/AR market shows. Maybe in ML services they could challenge Google a little more.

ljm 7y ago
I'm not sure many people would be keen on deploying their entire cloud on Facebook either. Forget about privacy concerns and all that, it just doesn't make sense when they have the 'move fast and break things' philosophy. The last thing you want in high availability cloud infra is a team of engineers who will sacrifice stability for innovation. Even if they did do it, there's not a chance they could launch it under 'Facebook'.
- throwaway894345 7y ago
  Do they have a "move fast and break things" philosophy in 2020? I know they did a decade ago, but is that still true today? Further, does that philosophy apply to their core infrastructure, or just leaf-node feature development? Is there any indication that Facebook's cloud infra team sacrifices stability for innovation? When was the last time Facebook had a major outage that was traced to some core service? How does their infra track record stack up to AWS (I'm a happy AWS customer, but their infrastructure flakes on us in a major way several times per year)?
  - thatfunkymunki 7y ago
    "move fast with stable infrastructure" is the current phrase
throwaway894345 7y ago

beardedman 7y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually did enter. I don't use FB personally, but I'm a big fan of the OSS efforts. > biggest hurdle is trust, given its problematic record on data privacy It is? FB is a corporation - much like Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon. Each of those have had their fair share of issues throughout the years. Too easy to be polarised with stuff like this. FB produced good tech and supports it too - which is more than I can say for Google. But I'll use Google for their search & docs products, which is top notch. There are no heroes/villains.

fenwick67 7y ago
Google and Facebook have particularly not-great privacy reputations because they are advertising companies whose business models are precluded on collecting your personal info.
- alharith 7y ago
  You don't have to have your business model be advertising in order to be shitty at privacy.
  - fenwick67 7y ago
    (...but it probably helps)
    - alharith 7y ago
      Counterintuitively, you are more likely to be better at privacy if you are in the business of selling data, especially in the current regulatory climate. The websites that have been the worst at maintaining my privacy were those that primarily sold physical products or medical services. You'd be amazed how many organizations broker data now.
- beardedman 7y ago
  Which people offer freely.

not2b 7y ago

You make money if you are the #1 or #2 player in a market. If you are more like #4, you will just lose money. If Facebook tried to enter the cloud market today, they would be way behind. Without a unique advantage that would induce customers to switch, why would anyone switch? And if they tried to compete by cutting prices they would just lose money.

caymanjim 7y ago
I agree with your statement, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. AWS is dominant, but their software/tools are horrendous. Their web admin UI looks, feels, and has the general usability of some horrible Java enterprise tool designed by a committee of Windows developers in the mid-00s, because that's exactly what it is. I don't know how Azure and GCloud compare, but they cannot possibly be worse. AWS does what people need, but I don't know anyone who likes working with it. Except maybe Windows admins from the 00s.
- b34r 7y ago
  Gcloud’s interface is significantly better
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  Agreed, I feel like AWS has the worst UI of them all, followed by Azure's Metro/Visual Studio-style UI and then GCP is OK on the UI front, but lacks when it comes to monitoring and configuration options for things like CloudSQL for example.
  - aeyes 7y ago
    AWS is all about the API, some services don't even have a UI. Once you start using the API AWS is the best option out there.
    - AsyncAwait 7y ago
      I did hear that, but sometimes is nice do do things from the UI, especially when testing new services.

amelius 7y ago

Commoditize your complement.

tinyhouse 7y ago

Why every large company needs to be in every business?

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Every large company has certain dependencies (compute, networking, and storage in this case, although you could argue for ex. food service, HR, maybe financial tooling), and those dependencies entail cost and risk, with more risk from using external vendors. So eventually, big enough companies build their own. They build their own datacenters, write their own provisioning tools, design their own network setups, flesh out their own HR departments. And then they look at it and say, "hey, if we can safely sell this, we can recoup the costs of building it, and maybe turn a profit." And if their system is general enough, and they can deal with security well enough, then usually they do just that. Compute is easy to rent out. Networks require some work for security but it's quite doable. HR tends to be too specialized and/or sensitive to resell. (But not always, and sometimes you do see companies reselling employee portals and whatnot.)

kabapadum 7y ago

It is. For some of the partners, they do provide a cloud solution and at much reduced price compared to AWS. ps: i think it will be public cloud someday

cameronbrown 7y ago
Woah. Got more info on this?
- kabapadum 7y ago
  Unfortunately not, Our monthly spending on AWS was more then 5m$ when 7 months ago we were contacted and offered to try their solution.

daxfohl 7y ago

Based on what would they expect to win business, from whom? Could they do it at lower cost? Probably not. Do they have any technology that leapfrogs the others? Not aware of any. Do they have good business relationships for this sort of thing? No. So what else is there?

efsavage 7y ago

I worked at FB, and I think they would probably do OK if they entered the space as they are very smart about physical infrastructure, but the most plausible explanation I heard from an executive (forget which one) when asked this was that they are already building out at a very fast clip, and feel that they can make a better ROI by using that infrastructure themselves rather than renting it out.

the_watcher 7y ago
Matches my experience - was very much a "sure, we could do that, but it's not our core competency or the best use of our resources"
basch 7y ago
Right now facebook has a couple options when a new network emerges. Buy the competitor, clone the competitor, ignore them, compete with a not completely similar product. Why not another option, like "take a percentage of their profit in exchange for service." I dont think it should be looked at as just as direct ROI, but also as a hedge against future obsolescence. Its a better position to be in, to be the ocean, if everybody wakes up one day and jumps ship. Visa and Microsoft make a ton of money being a grease or tax on other business, a small shaving of money in exchange for massive efficiency, instead of trying to BE every business. Is anyone offering an out of the box Social Graph as a Service kit? It would also be a huge growth opportunity for Facebook Ad Services, to be THE ad marketplace of all new social networks. And in a play right out of Adobe's playbook, buying some things like bigcommerce, ecommdash, shiptstation would position them to sell underlying services that allow their customers to compete directly with amazon, ebay, adobe, salesforce. There is surely a lot more money they could make selling saas and pass, vs becoming another generic iaas provider. https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-opportunity-02-03 https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868341
mgiampapa 7y ago
Zuck has said as much at all hands meetings. If the growth knobs were turned off across all it's products and spare capacity became a thing, then it might make sense, but at the rate they are building there is no purpose to being a middle man. Make a code optimization and save 1-2% of CPU on the web tier and you will be a hero.

jedberg 7y ago

They may still get into the business, and it would make sense for them to do so, and may even solve their privacy problem while they are at it. Amazon did it a long time ago, and when they started, they had no sales team. They had to build that capability slowly over time, but they had the first mover advantage, so they had time to learn. Now they are number one. Microsoft already had the enterprise sales team, they had to learn how to sell cloud. They had some trouble with the shift, and with the technology, but now they are knocking it out of the park, and are solidly in the number two spot behind Amazon. Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team, nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep growing. This is the position Facebook would be in. They probably have the technology, or can at least attract the necessary talent to build it (I know that I would at least listen if they said, “Come build a new cloud with us from the ground up”). But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google. Now, in Google’s defense, they have realized they are coming from behind, and as such have focused on selling their higher level services. If you want to do AI and Machine Learning, Google’s cloud is the place to do it! And then maybe while you’re there, if your core business is AI, maybe you’ll use some of their other services as well, since your data is already there. Facebook could make a similar play. They could build a cloud and then require any 3rd party apps that work with Facebook to use their cloud. This would jumpstart their adoption, and could potentially help them solve their privacy issues. They could require that you never send any personal Facebook data out of their cloud, and could closely monitor all the outbound traffic. Then they could theoretically allow even more access to Facebook data, if they knew they could control what happens to that data after the 3rd party gets hold of it. In other words they could launch a cloud that lets you run your 3rd party Facebook apps in a controlled and audited way, and even give you building blocks to do it quickly and efficiently. It would boost their bottom line, because there is good margins in compute and storage, and at the same time give them more control of their own data.

dilyevsky 7y ago
Google didn’t have sales team? Uh who do you think selling all those ads?

holler 7y ago

I’ve honestly asked this question multiple times to people. FB made a mistake not doing this 10+ years ago. Feels too late now. What can they offer that isn’t available already?

m_ke 7y ago

I’d like to know why they’re not in the search business. They have enough signal from their platforms to offer great personalized search results and it would allow them to grow their ad revenue with intent based ads.

enos_feedler 7y ago
The same reason why Apple is not in the search business even though search is a key part of the phone experience: someone else does the job really well. Facebook would need a way to differentiate the search experience. I don't think personalization is enough since Google personalizes too. I also don't think a company should build products for the _purpose_ of revenue. Revenue is the output of building a great product with a purpose for users. So I think it goes back to Facebook asking what unique purpose would it provide in it's search experience?
- m_ke 7y ago
  Facebook should get into the search business for the same reason that Apple is getting into the software subscription business, it's an obvious way to grow their business. Facebook already has the analytics in place from their share buttons, ad platform and user engagement on the feed to create a great ranking system. A lot of people already use instagram to search for restaurants, fashion, travel and products, same goes for facebook marketplace and business pages, all they'd need to do is expand the search bars in their apps to include web results. Tracking search queries would give them true intent data that they could use to improve their ad targeting across their whole ad platform. The only thing google has on facebook right now is the ability to let advertisers target search queries. (just did a google search and it looks like they're starting to add that option: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/reach-people-who-are-actively-shopping-with-ads-in-facebook-search-results https://www.facebook.com/business/news/reach-people-who-are-...)
vikramkr 7y ago
Because why would you use it over Google? That's a lot of effort to build and launch a likely poorly differentiated service that they'd need to spend a lot of money on to steal users from Google. Why would a user prefer Facebook to Google for search?

zapttt 7y ago

because everyone there was hired from yahoo and other "portals". really. those folks have a natural tendency to fatten the middle management layer and focus on buzzwords that shake the core business (mobile! vr!) and feature creeping until the product is so broken it dies. all while killing the few trully tech/innovative teams.

ksec 7y ago

>The global public cloud computing spending was $229 billion in 2019 and will grow to $500 billion in 2023, according to IDC. So I decided to check on the article itself [1]. >"Adoption of public (shared) cloud services continues to grow rapidly as enterprises, especially in professional services, telecommunications, and retail...... Basically what IDC labels as cloud isn't what is being discussed in the blog, or in the HN comment section which is pretty much strictly IaaS business. The cloud from IDC includes SaaS. Things like ERP and CRM. And they even said this >Software as a Service (SaaS) will be the largest category of cloud computing, capturing more than half of all public cloud spending in throughout the forecast. SaaS spending, Which basically makes the blog and ~60 comments on HN so far irrelevant. The absolute vast majority of growth are going into SaaS, aka Microsoft's Exchange, Dynamic 365, Office 365, SalesForce etc.... What about IaaS? >IaaS...., will also be the fastest growing category of cloud spending with a five-year CAGR of 32.0%. That is great. Until you look at the number closely, >China will experience the fastest growth in public cloud services spending over the five-year forecast period with a 49.1% CAGR. Latin America will also deliver strong public cloud spending growth with a 38.3% CAGR. What that means is that the CAGR, while impressive, will mostly be focused on market that are not current well served, China, India, Latin America, South East Asia. Of Course Europe and NA are also growing, but likely at a comparatively lower pace. All these are 3 years from now, a very short period of time in terms of infrastructure building. Is this far too late in the Game for Facebook? Do they have a long terms sustainability plan? As we have been shown again and again, Enterprise Tech moves very slowly and tends to stick with big brand or long time partners. One can look at Google Vs Microsoft as example. It seems the money right now is on HPC, AI, Scientific Computing, Deep Learning, all these seems to have infinite appetite of computation power that even with 1.4nm by 2026 the performance still would not have satisfy needs. But what about normal Web Server usage? Are we close to its peak? The growth in Cloud is partly ( or mostly ) driven by Smartphone, the world went from 1.5 billion internet user using it during free time to near 5 billion user using it All the time. Smartphone sales, and user growth has slow down, IaaS usually being lagging behind in supply, are we nearing the end of the growth curve? ( Excluding Scientific Computing Needs ) Remember a lot of these are talking in Dollar terms, 3 years from now the same dollar should have bought you 50% more computational power. And that is excluding any possible disruption from ARM. [1] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45340719 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45340719

KaiserPro 7y ago

Here are a few reasons: 1) its hard to do well and still be profitable. 2) It would require a massive internal shift, The security tools internally for doing things like IAMs are far to primitive. It would take years to re-tool, stopping momentum on products that make money 3) its not where Zuckerberg see facebook in the future. That future is AR/VR. Google stumbled with AR, It's structure means that any AR will eat at the mobile buisness. Apple might make a splash, but its unlikely that they will be first to market. Which leaves a whole segment for facebook to dominate, if it makes a decent product, and tackles it's image.

nojvek 7y ago
Apple just unveiled an ipad with lidar sensors. I would say Apple is poised to make the biggest impact since they can make the most phenomenal mass market hardware and well designed software to go with it. AR/VR will still take a while to be mass market. We need a lot more compute, better algorithms and hardware.

seshagiric 7y ago

I heard they are very passionate in aligning to their mission - empowering people to form community and brining world together. How does entering into Cloud Business align to the company mission? Wouldn't it be a distraction?

viklove 7y ago
I think you misspelled "spying on users and selling data/ads."
- nojvek 7y ago
  Well both Google and FB have some sort of vague bullshit mission statements. What matters at the end of day is growth and how wallstreet sees them. That's how they measure themselves. Facebook more-so than it's peers "Growth at any cost".

surferbayarea 7y ago

Their history and relationship with the developer community has been contentious - facebook apps, parse, WhatsApp bot, etc etc

boynamedsue 7y ago

The fundamental question is this: Would Facebook have any credibility with enterprises? My sense: No.

hudvin 7y ago

Yes, why not to sell data from dbs, backups, drives? :D

RivieraKid 7y ago

It's now a competitive, commoditized market. They would probably make more money by buying S&P 500. (How is this not obvious to the author?)

nikhilsimha 7y ago

Used to work at fb in an infra team. Their abstraction for job scheduling (Tupperware) is about 5 years behind - something like Borg or EC2/EMR. Something like that is a fundamental reason why fb can’t do cloud as it is right now. Plus, the infra teams do operate like product - impact at all costs. Which to most management translates to short-term impact over technical quality. It would be a true 180 in terms of eng culture if they could pull off a cloud platform. An example is how they bought Parse and killed it, while firebase at google is doing extremely well. Having said all that, I think focusing on impact over technical quality is probably the right business decision for what they were trying to do at the time - drive engagement and revenue.

thedance 7y ago
When you say that Tupperware is 5 years behind Borg, what do you mean? It would take 5 years to add current Borg features? It lacks features Borg had 5 years ago? Or it would take 5 years to reach parity with Borg as launched, i.e. it's actually 17+ years behind?
- justicezyx 7y ago
  The last statement is factually wrong. Borg was launched 2005, 5 years behind would be 20 years.
ipsum2 7y ago
I think 5 years behind may be an exaggeration. People can read https://engineering.fb.com/data-center-engineering/tupperware/ https://engineering.fb.com/data-center-engineering/tupperwar... and make up their own mind.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  5 years might actually be right on the mark? I think Borg and EC2 et al. had all of this functionality 5 years ago, but I'm not sure it was all there more than 5 years ago.
deleted 7y ago

mesozoic 7y ago

Not exactly on the cutting edge of tech from what I hear.

tanilama 7y ago

I don't think the author understands why/how Cloud business works. Software is just part of it. It is a logistics problem fundamentally. And Amazon is not only a software shop, it is also the most advanced logistics company in US, both physically and virtually, and those two go hand-in-hand. So no, I don't think FB can get into Cloud business anytime soon, and I also doubt they have that much of the cash to actually expand the business, it is going to be huge investment, globally. The market right now is not going to be forgiving to new comers. Disclaimer: ex-AWS employee

herostratus101 7y ago

> The tougher part is perhaps not technical, but human. Facebook will have to build out an enterprise sales and support team that is culturally and operationally very different from running an ad-supported social network. Google, also a primarily ad-supported company, suffered from this “identity crisis” and is still trying to catch up to AWS and Azure, despite offering what many believe is a superior technical product. Who on earth believes that GCP is in the same universe as even Azure, let alone AWS?

stopachka 7y ago

(Former FB Eng) The main reason is because it doesn't align with FB's values. How is building a cloud business going to connect the world? (As fluffy as this sounds, mission was taken seriously -- all the way up to Schrep)

bor100003 7y ago
How do the Libra crypto connect the world? No sarcasm here.
- baby 7y ago
  It allows anyone around the world to send and receive money instantly and at low cost.
- lmm 7y ago
  Having an easy way to send money around the world without having to worry about which currency it should be in would be a huge help for some communities. A lot of artistic/creative groups work on a kind of semi-gift-economy model where everyone buys everyone else's stuff, not quite as an arms-length market-value transaction but as a semi-social interaction where you buy things from the people you hang out with online at what's probably more than a "fair" price. Having something like Patreon but less US-specific and more closely integrated with social media (admittedly Patreon's integration with Discord is starting to fill that gap) would genuinely help.

justinholmes 7y ago

I don't understand why Facebook doesn't offer there developer machine provisioning to the outside world. They have the talent to build VPCs on top of SDN.

hyperpower 7y ago

Related: I explored Facebook's physical network in https://nullset.xyz/2020/02/28/exploring-facebooks-network/ https://nullset.xyz/2020/02/28/exploring-facebooks-network/.

ycmimi 7y ago

I liked Parse.

dreamer77 7y ago

I am more interested into why Netflix isn't in the cloud business. They have developed so much for infrastructure robustness with Chaos Monkey and the like.

hintymad 7y ago
Because Netflix is razor-sharp focused on their core business? Speaking of their infra, Netflix focuses on productivity, based on a fundamental value that everyone inside the company has freedom and responsibility. This culture empowers the engineers there to build amazing tools that make employees very happy, but in the meantime the stacks they built may not be suitable for serving individual enterprise customers. For instance, they certainly don't fully use the elaborate security infrastructure that AWS offers. They don't worry too much about being frugal, either. Remember the famous saying that "Netflix is a log company that happens to stream movies"? They do store everything, at the cost of millions of dollars. Their monitoring system is so easy to use and so expressive, that it blows out any known monitoring systems out of water, but in the meantime it requires thousands of machines (amazingly, it used to be only 4 engineers manning the whole stack. A perfect example that shows how much productivity good systems can bring to engineers). So, yeah, great company and great stacks, but it does not mean they can compete in enterprise cloud business.

deleted 7y ago

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HenriTEL 7y ago

First section is misleading, cassandra, react, pytoch are not cloud tech. The cloud is what you may need to run and scale those technologies. What cluster management software did facebook open-sourced ? I don't see any. Maybe they use existing open-sourced techs.

nojvek 7y ago

Cloud is a high volume, low margin business. Ads are a high margin business. When looking at FB vs AppMicroAmaGoog financials, Facebook has the highest % profit. They also make the most per employee. Plus they are the king of social networks with Insta & Whatsapp as their brands. What works against them is Facebook doesn't have a great reputation with developers, so even if they step into cloud, it will be very hard. Plus corporations will always be worried that Facebook will peek into their usage and power their ads engine.