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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 fi

by 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
> You don't really synergize social media with cloud infra. I think your first-mover and competitive industry points stand, but I don't see how retail and search synergize better with cloud infra than social. The cloud infra business model is (as far as I can tell) just building general purpose computing-at-scale features in a reusable, billable way and selling those to consumers. VM/container/database/serverless/etc orchestration isn't more aligned with retail than other businesses as far as I can tell.
- tekkk 7y ago
  Well with retail you are kind of already in the business of buying and selling hardware, so to me it doesn't seem that big of a stretch. In both you are handling big volumes with very high emphasis on cost-margins. Search, yeah. Intrinsically maybe not, but Google has some very skilled engineers and researchers, who have pioneered a lot of the modern cloud applications/algorithms eg Borg/k8s, MapReduce, GFS and so on. So they have the know-how on how to build topnotch services, just not maybe as good business-savviness to sell them.

by tekkk 7y ago

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

> You don't really synergize social media with cloud infra. I think your first-mover and competitive industry points stand, but I don't see how retail and search synergize better with cloud infra than social. The cloud infra business model is (as far as I can tell) just building general purpose computing-at-scale features in a reusable, billable way and selling those to consumers. VM/container/database/serverless/etc orchestration isn't more aligned with retail than other businesses as far as I can tell.

tekkk 7y ago
Well with retail you are kind of already in the business of buying and selling hardware, so to me it doesn't seem that big of a stretch. In both you are handling big volumes with very high emphasis on cost-margins. Search, yeah. Intrinsically maybe not, but Google has some very skilled engineers and researchers, who have pioneered a lot of the modern cloud applications/algorithms eg Borg/k8s, MapReduce, GFS and so on. So they have the know-how on how to build topnotch services, just not maybe as good business-savviness to sell them.