5 ms·

Do they share infrastructure?

by threatripper 6y ago

fastball 6y ago
Yeah, that's what I was wondering. Strange that there is a SPOF for Facebook/Insta/Whatsapp.
- threatripper 6y ago
  I had the impression that they are still run like mostly independent companies who only share some data on the backend.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Yeah that's what I was thinking too, so this is probably DNS related.
  - thrusong 6y ago
    AFAIK, I remember reading something about Instagram moving into Facebook datacentres some time ago. I believe they were on AWS before the acquisition.
- godelmachine 6y ago
  Might I ask what’s SPOF?
  - fastball 6y ago
    Single Point of Failure.
    - godelmachine 6y ago
      Thanks
  - octo_t 6y ago
    Single Point Of Failure
    - godelmachine 6y ago
      Ta
lavp 6y ago
Given the fact that it's also down, I'd say yes
- threatripper 6y ago
  It could be some rouge admin who actually deleted Facebook.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    At that size of a company there's usually blast radius restrictions and per-role permissions. I don't expect anyone has enough rights to "delete Facebook" on their own.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      I guarantee you that there are 100+ people who could take Facebook down for 24+ hours if they went rogue. For example the people responsible for the bootup scripts of Facebook infra could sneak in a "0 0 1 * * /bin/rm -rf ${TEMPDIR}/*" into crontab... They'd set the commit message as "clear out temp monthly" and it would get deployed across the entire fleet till in the first of next month every disk at Facebook gets erased because TEMPDIR isn't defined... I guess they have enough pending stock to deter them...
      - tracyhenry 6y ago
        How though? Every past author of that script would be notified of such a change. It'd be insane if all of them would pretend they didn't see it and accept that change.
        londons_explore 6y ago
        It would be hidden amongst a big refactor, and it would have a bunch of unit and integration tests that all work correctly (because they do set the environment variables correctly). Writing code that appears to do one thing and actually does another is very doable - you only need to hide one malicious line amongst thousands in a code review, while the reviewer needs to inspect every line. Besides, the vast majority of code reviews are 10 minutes or less.

Do they share infrastructure?

fastball 6y ago

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. Strange that there is a SPOF for Facebook/Insta/Whatsapp.

threatripper 6y ago
I had the impression that they are still run like mostly independent companies who only share some data on the backend.
- fastball 6y ago
  Yeah that's what I was thinking too, so this is probably DNS related.
- thrusong 6y ago
  AFAIK, I remember reading something about Instagram moving into Facebook datacentres some time ago. I believe they were on AWS before the acquisition.
godelmachine 6y ago
Might I ask what’s SPOF?
- fastball 6y ago
  Single Point of Failure.
  - godelmachine 6y ago
    Thanks
- octo_t 6y ago
  Single Point Of Failure
  - godelmachine 6y ago
    Ta

lavp 6y ago

Given the fact that it's also down, I'd say yes

threatripper 6y ago
It could be some rouge admin who actually deleted Facebook.
- viraptor 6y ago
  At that size of a company there's usually blast radius restrictions and per-role permissions. I don't expect anyone has enough rights to "delete Facebook" on their own.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    I guarantee you that there are 100+ people who could take Facebook down for 24+ hours if they went rogue. For example the people responsible for the bootup scripts of Facebook infra could sneak in a "0 0 1 * * /bin/rm -rf ${TEMPDIR}/*" into crontab... They'd set the commit message as "clear out temp monthly" and it would get deployed across the entire fleet till in the first of next month every disk at Facebook gets erased because TEMPDIR isn't defined... I guess they have enough pending stock to deter them...
    - tracyhenry 6y ago
      How though? Every past author of that script would be notified of such a change. It'd be insane if all of them would pretend they didn't see it and accept that change.
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        It would be hidden amongst a big refactor, and it would have a bunch of unit and integration tests that all work correctly (because they do set the environment variables correctly). Writing code that appears to do one thing and actually does another is very doable - you only need to hide one malicious line amongst thousands in a code review, while the reviewer needs to inspect every line. Besides, the vast majority of code reviews are 10 minutes or less.