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The data center infrastructure that Facebook (Meta) has is probably in the top 5 in this world (behind only Amazon, Microsoft, Google). They might want to beco

The data center infrastructure that Facebook (Meta) has is probably in the top 5 in this world (behind only Amazon, Microsoft, Google). They might want to become a cloud infrastructure provider for some side money and buy themselves some time to figure out this Metaverse fantasy :) Hey, AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity.

dekhn 5y ago
in the world? ali baba would like to have a word
- intrepidsoldier 5y ago
  Ah yes. Fair point.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  True, but Alibaba does do cloud. Facebook and Tencent are far and away the biggest web companies that don’t do some sort of B2B cloud offering.
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    https://cloud.tencent.com https://cloud.tencent.com ?
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      My bad! I meant any exposure outside of mainland China. However it appears as if Alibaba Cloud may have almost none either. I also did not know Tencent cloud was in double digit Chinese market share now. So yeah, incorrect there. On the whole, Facebook is the one web giant across the world that does not do cloud computing at all or much enterprise.
      - netheril96 5y ago
        Both Alibaba and Tencent cloud have presence outside mainland China. Hong Kong and the south east Asia most, but also in the Silicon Valley. You haven’t heard of that because they are not that successful in the US.
        skinnymuch 5y ago
        Ah interesting. I was trying to find market shares outside mainland China, but couldn't in my quick searching. I'll try looking again later. Yeah, I've heard of trying ovh [cloud]. That's the only non-American company's cloud I've heard about trying. Oracle and one another, maybe IBM?, are the only non-big three clouds I've ever looked at. Mostly because of their better free tiers and/or healthy free credits.
voidfunc 5y ago
This would be an interesting but perilous pivot... trying to get into cloud infra at this point seems like an insane idea. What would even be the attraction for company to want to run on FB cloud vs one of the established players that now have a decade plus of real world operations experience from running 3rd party customer workloads? If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Valve or build a gaming platform. I don't know how they can be successful in whatever the fuck the Metaverse is without a gaming/media platform.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Too bad Bungie and Activision are off the table! I like these Zuck spitball ideas tho. Is the idea really that the metaverse is their big next market? I like VR but who the heck believes FB will lead it?
  - akmarinov 5y ago
    Time to pick up EA and make Fifa and Madden exclusive to the Metaverse
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    Well they are leading it right now and no one is really stepping up to do anything about it unfortunately. Sony could if they were game enough to compete with the Oculus Quest and build something that would work either standalone or wirelessly with a PS5 to handle more intensive games. Same goes for MS ofc. I think the big fuckup by FB/Meta here is not having the foresight to acquire Unity no matter the cost. They should have made a massive stock deal for it even if it caused their own stock price to take a massive hit in the short term. The long term benefit of owning the most pervasive toolchain + the most dominant VR platform would have essentially ensured their market position for the foreseeable future. The only other engine that is half-decent for VR is Epic's UnrealEngine and there is a huge step up in complexity, pipeline etc from Unity to get there.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    You mean “Meta” will lead it?
Thaxll 5y ago
They have only 2 DC, what exatly can they sell, on top of that they built it for Facebook so how is it marketable?
- ojbyrne 5y ago
  They have 18: https://datacenters.fb.com/#locations https://datacenters.fb.com/#locations
- renaudg 5y ago
  Make that 18. With custom server designs and some of the best power efficiency out there. Amazon also had built their DCs for Amazon, and Google for Google, so that's not a valid argument. But it does take a lot of work to turn that into a marketable product (and transform your company culture to support it), and I don't think it makes sense for Meta to go down that route.
eschulz 5y ago
Yes absolutely since that field will only continue to grow. Make cloud computing super beginner friendly like Heroku. I think an opportunity can be found in approaching search. They already have so much data about what people are interested in, and they can start by perfecting Facebook Marketplace to a simple user-friendly successor to Craig's List.
virtuallynathan 5y ago
Based on my calculations, Facebook has more DC space/power than Google/Amazon/Microsoft. They have around 40 million sq ft of DC space, and likely ~5GW of power. They have 48 buildings in 18 locations, with 47 more under construction. AWS Data centers are fairly small, ~180,000 sq ft or so generally, us-east-2 is about 900,000 sq ft. us-east-1 perhaps 8 million sq ft. Google likely has more network capacity, but FB is catching up.
- redwood 5y ago
  I don't see how that could possibly be true. AWS must be much bigger than Facebook
- iamgopal 5y ago
  Source ?
  - virtuallynathan 5y ago
    Now there's a real source! "Amazon Web Services owns 11.9 million square feet of property, leases 14.1 million square feet" That's 26 million sq ft vs Facebook's 40.5 million.
  - virtuallynathan 5y ago
    Personal intel, I maintain a map and spreadsheet, combined with publicly available information and press releases.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Google does more network requests than the rest of the external web put together. My understanding is FB is far behind Amazon.
dylan604 5y ago
So if FB doesn't need the capacity, why do they have it? Retail obviously has a big push in the ramp up to the holidays, so there's a reason to have had more capacity than always required. Does FB see spikes like that, or is it more consistent? I don't see FB having "spare" capacity to lease. Then again, I'm not a data center manager type, and just sit here in my comfy armchair playing QB.
- ma2rten 5y ago
  When I was working at a smaller social network, we saw huge spikes during holidays when people didn't have anything else to do. I would imagine new years eve is also huge for facebook, when everyone wishes each other happy new year.
dastbe 5y ago
> AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity. No, it really did not. The reality is even if Meta has the best data center infrastructure in the world their infrastructure is focused solely on solving their problems and operates under the constraint that it is not consumable by any arbitrary company. aws was built more or less in isolation to amazon's original infrastructure and gcp was built as a layer on top of google's internal infrastructure. there is use in what exists internally but only to (re)build the product you'd sell. The lead time for them to get even basic primitives out the door would be significant, not even considering the depth of features that more sophisticated cloud customers want.
cwkoss 5y ago
I think their brand is the antithesis of the data protection wants of the majority of cloud webservice customers.
paxys 5y ago
Spare data center capacity is worthless on its own. AWS and others have 15+ years worth of investments in infrastructure and services on top of it, and Facebook needs to have all of that and more to become a real public cloud. It is going to be next to impossible for them to catch up to the dozens of players already in that space.
TomAbel 5y ago
Kevin Xu of Interconnected wrote an interesting analysis post about Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business[1] its worth a read, he points out that they have the tech for it but they don't seem interested and even if they were the hard part isn't necessarily the technical aspect its building the human part >>"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." He also points out they also have a trust deficient due to all the privacy and misinformation scandals. [1]https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud-business/ https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud...

dekhn 5y ago

in the world? ali baba would like to have a word

intrepidsoldier 5y ago
Ah yes. Fair point.
skinnymuch 5y ago
True, but Alibaba does do cloud. Facebook and Tencent are far and away the biggest web companies that don’t do some sort of B2B cloud offering.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  https://cloud.tencent.com https://cloud.tencent.com ?
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    My bad! I meant any exposure outside of mainland China. However it appears as if Alibaba Cloud may have almost none either. I also did not know Tencent cloud was in double digit Chinese market share now. So yeah, incorrect there. On the whole, Facebook is the one web giant across the world that does not do cloud computing at all or much enterprise.
    - netheril96 5y ago
      Both Alibaba and Tencent cloud have presence outside mainland China. Hong Kong and the south east Asia most, but also in the Silicon Valley. You haven’t heard of that because they are not that successful in the US.
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        Ah interesting. I was trying to find market shares outside mainland China, but couldn't in my quick searching. I'll try looking again later. Yeah, I've heard of trying ovh [cloud]. That's the only non-American company's cloud I've heard about trying. Oracle and one another, maybe IBM?, are the only non-big three clouds I've ever looked at. Mostly because of their better free tiers and/or healthy free credits.

voidfunc 5y ago

This would be an interesting but perilous pivot... trying to get into cloud infra at this point seems like an insane idea. What would even be the attraction for company to want to run on FB cloud vs one of the established players that now have a decade plus of real world operations experience from running 3rd party customer workloads? If we are spitballing ideas, If I am Zuck I'm looking at figuring out how to buy Valve or build a gaming platform. I don't know how they can be successful in whatever the fuck the Metaverse is without a gaming/media platform.

magicjosh 5y ago
Too bad Bungie and Activision are off the table! I like these Zuck spitball ideas tho. Is the idea really that the metaverse is their big next market? I like VR but who the heck believes FB will lead it?
- akmarinov 5y ago
  Time to pick up EA and make Fifa and Madden exclusive to the Metaverse
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Well they are leading it right now and no one is really stepping up to do anything about it unfortunately. Sony could if they were game enough to compete with the Oculus Quest and build something that would work either standalone or wirelessly with a PS5 to handle more intensive games. Same goes for MS ofc. I think the big fuckup by FB/Meta here is not having the foresight to acquire Unity no matter the cost. They should have made a massive stock deal for it even if it caused their own stock price to take a massive hit in the short term. The long term benefit of owning the most pervasive toolchain + the most dominant VR platform would have essentially ensured their market position for the foreseeable future. The only other engine that is half-decent for VR is Epic's UnrealEngine and there is a huge step up in complexity, pipeline etc from Unity to get there.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  You mean “Meta” will lead it?

Thaxll 5y ago

They have only 2 DC, what exatly can they sell, on top of that they built it for Facebook so how is it marketable?

ojbyrne 5y ago
They have 18: https://datacenters.fb.com/#locations https://datacenters.fb.com/#locations
renaudg 5y ago
Make that 18. With custom server designs and some of the best power efficiency out there. Amazon also had built their DCs for Amazon, and Google for Google, so that's not a valid argument. But it does take a lot of work to turn that into a marketable product (and transform your company culture to support it), and I don't think it makes sense for Meta to go down that route.

eschulz 5y ago

Yes absolutely since that field will only continue to grow. Make cloud computing super beginner friendly like Heroku. I think an opportunity can be found in approaching search. They already have so much data about what people are interested in, and they can start by perfecting Facebook Marketplace to a simple user-friendly successor to Craig's List.

virtuallynathan 5y ago

Based on my calculations, Facebook has more DC space/power than Google/Amazon/Microsoft. They have around 40 million sq ft of DC space, and likely ~5GW of power. They have 48 buildings in 18 locations, with 47 more under construction. AWS Data centers are fairly small, ~180,000 sq ft or so generally, us-east-2 is about 900,000 sq ft. us-east-1 perhaps 8 million sq ft. Google likely has more network capacity, but FB is catching up.

redwood 5y ago
I don't see how that could possibly be true. AWS must be much bigger than Facebook
iamgopal 5y ago
Source ?
- virtuallynathan 5y ago
  Now there's a real source! "Amazon Web Services owns 11.9 million square feet of property, leases 14.1 million square feet" That's 26 million sq ft vs Facebook's 40.5 million.
- virtuallynathan 5y ago
  Personal intel, I maintain a map and spreadsheet, combined with publicly available information and press releases.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Google does more network requests than the rest of the external web put together. My understanding is FB is far behind Amazon.

dylan604 5y ago

So if FB doesn't need the capacity, why do they have it? Retail obviously has a big push in the ramp up to the holidays, so there's a reason to have had more capacity than always required. Does FB see spikes like that, or is it more consistent? I don't see FB having "spare" capacity to lease. Then again, I'm not a data center manager type, and just sit here in my comfy armchair playing QB.

ma2rten 5y ago
When I was working at a smaller social network, we saw huge spikes during holidays when people didn't have anything else to do. I would imagine new years eve is also huge for facebook, when everyone wishes each other happy new year.

dastbe 5y ago

> AWS started because Amazon wanted to lease out their spare infrastructure capacity. No, it really did not. The reality is even if Meta has the best data center infrastructure in the world their infrastructure is focused solely on solving their problems and operates under the constraint that it is not consumable by any arbitrary company. aws was built more or less in isolation to amazon's original infrastructure and gcp was built as a layer on top of google's internal infrastructure. there is use in what exists internally but only to (re)build the product you'd sell. The lead time for them to get even basic primitives out the door would be significant, not even considering the depth of features that more sophisticated cloud customers want.

cwkoss 5y ago

I think their brand is the antithesis of the data protection wants of the majority of cloud webservice customers.

paxys 5y ago

Spare data center capacity is worthless on its own. AWS and others have 15+ years worth of investments in infrastructure and services on top of it, and Facebook needs to have all of that and more to become a real public cloud. It is going to be next to impossible for them to catch up to the dozens of players already in that space.

TomAbel 5y ago

Kevin Xu of Interconnected wrote an interesting analysis post about Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business[1] its worth a read, he points out that they have the tech for it but they don't seem interested and even if they were the hard part isn't necessarily the technical aspect its building the human part >>"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." He also points out they also have a trust deficient due to all the privacy and misinformation scandals. [1]https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud-business/ https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud...