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Ask HN: Do you think Meta could compete with AWS?

• hwestiii 4y ago
  Is "silicone" now an acceptable word to describe microprocessors? I'm familiar with its use regarding body modification, but...
• gremlinsinc 4y ago
  Why would anyone want that? Personally, I'd like to see some huge collective/co-op form to create an Amazon competitor a TRUE Amazon competitor (all their major profitable verticals -- esp FBA, Fullfillment, and Ecommerce, with AWS just a cherry on top.).
• deleted 4y ago
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• eatonphil 4y ago
  The move fast and break things aspect might be a knock against them. But since Facebook has been trying to diversify I too am curious why they haven't tried their own cloud products yet.
  • roland35 4y ago
    "Break things" is now dropped from the official company values ;) it is now just "Move Fast" along with "Focus on Long-term Impact"
    • notyourwork 4y ago
      Breaking things can have long term impact.
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  Nope. Pick a large AAA always online gaming company and ask the same question and I think the answer is the same. Just because a company runs a ton of IT infrastructure doesn't mean they would automatically be capable of running VM's for others. As an aside, I would not trust data security on any solution Meta comes up with, their business model and ethos is user data for sale.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    Am kinda surprised Steam didn't create a value-ad turnkey game server solution on a third party or own cloud. Or maybe that exists? Been out of gaming for awhile...
    • formerly_proven 4y ago
      I believe Steam/Valve offers their SteamNet for third parties, which is basically a non-IP VPN centered around low-latency. As an additional advantage, the network itself only allows you to talk to a game server when authorized, so attacking game servers is way harder, since the game server (software) itself doesn't have internet connectivity any more and is only reachable through that VPN.
• 4RealFreedom 4y ago
  It's a pretty saturated market. It would be hard to break in.
  • nkozyra 4y ago
    I think this is the biggest challenge. What's their edge (no pun intended)?
• markuman123 4y ago
  No.
• brk 4y ago
  All things considered, I do not see why they couldn't. Much like when Amazon first got into that business, it would likely require them to make some infrastructure changes, hire some people, etc. But there is no logical reason why they could not offer a competitive option. However I do think that from a business standpoint it would feel a bit out of place, or even desperate, for Facebook to get into that space. A more logical approach might be for them to do something more like acquire Wix and allow businesses to have pages that were more dynamic than just a Facebook page. Allow for more direct e-commerce, etc. (and take a cut). If that was successful, they could grow into more datacenter type services as a logical extension.
  • samwillis 4y ago
    Facebook buying Wix or the equivalent would be an admission there is an internet outside their walled garden. It's not going to happen, they are too hooked on the idea that their platforms are the internet and users shouldn't venture outside them. Ask any advertiser who has used Facebook, the in app browsers are actively hostile to leaving the app and make conversion more difficult.
    • brk 4y ago
      I agree it would be an admission of failure. But so would trying to compete with AWS, IMO. So if they are so out of ideas that they theoretically need to get into that business then doing in in stages would look less bad. At least that is my theory. I’m sure this whole meta verse thing is going to take off any day now.
• anthonyskipper 4y ago
  No, they would be almost 2 decades behind on building the required services and capturing market share. While they could make up the time on the tech side eventually, the market share is a very hard grind that they would not be able to pull off. Google has been trying and failing and they also have a decade head start now.
• samwillis 4y ago
  I think we are more likely to see Apple enter this market than Meta. I just don't think the company has the leadership with the vision to do it. They are too focused on being central to users lives to sell ads, and seem to be betting the company on VR which anyone outside the bubble can see has no place as a central social device. Apple on the other hand will be looking at the cloud market and be thinking how can they do it differently? Not just compete selling a commodity, be create a step change in the market. I could see them utilising their silicone expertises and some creative thinking to launch a cloud system unlike what is currently available.
  • Mikeb85 4y ago
    > I think we are more likely to see Apple enter this market than Meta Not a chance. They're allergic to other OSes and have discontinued MacOS server.
    • samwillis 4y ago
      Apple discontinued OSX Server because almost no one used it and it had very little value add. But also because they had discontinued any server hardware with the end of the XServe line. XServe was discontinued because they could not compete in a crowded market selling commodity Intel based servers. All of that has changed with Apple silicone, they are in a unique situation where they can compete by producing world class hardware no one else has access too with silicone processes that they have exclusive rights too.
      • Mikeb85 4y ago
        Amazon already has ARM servers in production. Plus, as we've all just mentioned, Apple has no server offering.
        • maxbond 4y ago
          Presumably they have a server distribution for their own use though, presumably they're doing lots of automated testing. And then there's iCloud, I don't know if that's just a bunch of Linux boxes but it might be MacOS boxes.
• throw__away7391 4y ago
  I was using Parse until Facebook acquired them in 2013, then abruptly shut down the platform a little over a year later. No, I do not think Meta could compete with AWS.
• jliptzin 4y ago
  Not in a million years would I trust Meta with my servers and data
  • achempion 4y ago
    GCP seems like a major player in this field even though google is also ad company known for sunsetting products and suspending accounts without clear resolution path (search for "gcp suspended" at HN).
    • jliptzin 4y ago
      I wouldn’t use GCP either
• deleted 4y ago
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• crazygringo 4y ago
  In a business sense, absolutely not. Sure they could build it technically, but they'd lose money. The issue isn't expanding data centers -- that's "easy". The issue is all of the software tooling, all of the gigantically massive platforms and services they have to not only build, but catch up to AWS/Google/Azure, all of which are moving targets. AWS launched in 2002. Google Cloud (GCE) basically started in 2012 and only recently has finally mostly caught up to become a fully-fledged viable competitor, which took an entire decade. Meta would be too late to the party. Sure they could launch something much smaller like a Digital Ocean competitor -- not a fully-featured cloud, mostly just servers and storage. But why would they? The margins are low and there's no strategic reason to do so.
  • rswskg 4y ago
    I would argue that google didn't catch up. Their product offering is vastly smaller and is the better for it.
  • georgyo 4y ago
    On one hand, I agree with you catching in all aspects would be near impossible. However similar to Apple, a more focused approach could be viable and profitable much more quickly. AWS has been around for a long time, but they also have tons and tons of feature bloat, and full of redundant services with different pricing. Should I use an ELB or an ALB? Fargate, ECS, EKS, code deploy? The list of services is overwhelming and confusing to most. A new major player with a cleanly architected design from the start with a clear path to happiness could be successful. Though Meta is full of feature bloat so I don't know if they would be the right choice to execute that vision.
    • notyourwork 4y ago
      Your examples aren’t really that good. An ALB is a type of ELB (load balancer). AWS has multiple types, ALBs run on layer 7 and NLBs run on layer 4 of the network stack. They also have classic which are considered deprecated and NAT Gateways. None of this is redundant. Similarly Fargate is a type of long running task you could start and run on an ECS cluster. Think web service running in a container instead of a traditional group of EC2 virtual machines. Tartare tasks are also a higher level virtualization abstraction compared to using EC2 in your ECS cluster. On the surface they all seem redundant because of the sheer breadth but when you start poking at them for a new solution that same breadth affords massive flexibility.
• linuxftw 4y ago
  I think they could, at least on a technical level. I don't think they would for business reasons, but there's plenty of smaller companies they could buy up if they didn't want to start from scratch.
• jhugo 4y ago
  AWS, Google Cloud, Azure etc are not best thought of as datacentre operators. It's the software that makes the cloud. AWS doesn't even operate all their own datacentres. The fact that they do operate many of them is primarily for cost efficiency; they can deliver the same product regardless.
• ctvo 4y ago
  Maybe? But do they want to? Here's the thing with being a founder led company: You still think it's your toy, your vision, and you know best. If the goal was to make money, Meta may be interested in cloud computing. Some of the biggest open source projects powering the internet are out of Meta. They have some understanding of developers and know how to interact with them and what they want / need. But alas, cloud computing isn't making the world a more connected place or whatever Zuckerberg thinks he's doing, and until he steps down, the focus required for this type of shift would be difficult to pull off.
• dev_0 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Not in a million years. Meta is an unorganized mess under an incompetent leadership, while AWS already hosts half the net for a reason.
• coldaxe_44 4y ago
  I highly doubt it as I know other cloud providers smaller than GCP and Azure have trouble with some clients as they want to move to AWS. Cause well the buzzwords. Realistically, Meta doesn't exactly have a great track record with user data and privacy. So I doubt a lot of companies would be willing to join. OVH was created in 1999 and I would say is less well known than AWS probs meta have a similar client to IBM Cloud or OVH.
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  They have no good reason to because AFAIK Microsoft and Google are still bleeding money with their cloud divisions because they have to hand out huge free credit grants to gain new customers. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-spent-barely-a-dime-on-microsofts-cloud-after-1-billion-deal https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-spent-bar... "When Microsoft in 2019 said it had invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the high-profile artificial intelligence startup agreed to develop its products exclusively using Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers."
• jacquesm 4y ago
  Not a chance. For a very simple reason: data center operations are reliant on trust between the parties hosting and the operators. If the party that operates the data center has indicated in no uncertain terms that they will be more than happy to violate trust at every junction then that party will have an uphill battle convincing potential customers that 'of course that does not apply to them'. Keep in mind that a hosting partner has physical access to your precious hardware, something that you yourself probably don't even have. As such they are ideally placed to violate your trust six ways from Sunday and if they don't have a clean track record in that respect and you go into business with them anyway you only have yourself to blame.
  • Semaphor 4y ago
    Good thing Google and Amazon are both known to be highly trustworthy and never fucking anyone over :)
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      That's fair, but compared to Zuckerberg they are saints in the trust department.
    • plorkyeran 4y ago
      When they first launched their cloud products, yes. GCP launched before the shutdown of Reader and the whole "Google kills everything" meme started, and I think it would have had a lot more difficulty getting going if it had launched two years later. Similarly AWS's cloud computing launched during the time period where Amazon was blowing everyone away with their logistics and had legendarily good customer service that'd bend over backwards to ensure that customers were happy.
      • Semaphor 4y ago
        That's actually a very good point. Disillusionment with both, and exposure of dirty deeds, started way later. I did not think of that.
• notacoward 4y ago
  No. I worked there, and saw the services available to developers. There's a dizzying array, and many of those services are quite excellent. However, they're deeply intertwined with each other and often quite idiosyncratic. That's going to be a hard sell in a market where people are already used to the Amazon or Google or Microsoft versions. There's a lot of automation, but it's mostly for the team running the service itself. If you're a user of a service, you're likely to be quite reliant on knowing a member of that team to get new allocations or resolve problems. This is fine for developers within a single org, but building out the self-service and multitenancy necessary to make it palatable to outside users would be a major undertaking even if all the oxygen weren't being sucked out of the rest of the company by metaverse stuff. Lastly, that capacity is already being actively used and they're barely keeping up with building out enough new capacity. Where are the resources going to come from to support outside users? It just doesn't make sense for them to try, technically or logistically or culturally. The last thing they need is more distractions.
• cletus 4y ago
  Ex-Facebooker Ex-Googler here. IMHO? Absolutely not. Infrastructure just isn't in FB's DNA. I've never worked at Amazon but my understanding was that AWS was born from bezos deciding one day that the whole company would adopt a microservices architecture and the basic technology for that became AWS. This is quintessential eat your own dogfood. They were first to market and committed a lot to it so they became dominant. Google (IMHO) only ever really entered the cloud space because they were afraid of AWS becoming so large that Google would cease to be a price-maker in the hardware space and would be a price-taker. I think I read at one point Google was purchasing 1 in 10 hard disks produced globally. That gives you a lot of power to set prices and secure supply if you're smart. Google didn't want to lose that position to Amazon so Cloud became a means of creating demand for more hardware. Internally, Google services run on what can only be described as a data center OS (ie Borg). You set resource constraints like how much memory and how many CPUs your processes need and there's a scheduler that makes sure you only share resources on a server with other processes within total constraints. There's more to this like flex resource scheduling but it'll do for this example. IIRC Linux's cgroups, which form the basis of this, were contributed to Linux by Google. Even so, my understand was that Google Cloud was relatively inefficient through all the networking and cloud VM/resource layers. This was years ago so may no longer be true and I have no idea how this compares to Amazon. But Google is prepared to get through that for other reasons. Still, Google doesn't use Cloud internally (unlike Amazon). Facebook does some things very well, particularly produce deployment. You really can push a diff to master and it just gets auto-deployed to prod 1-4 hours later. What's more you have a bunch of UI frameworks such that developing a fully-functional UI that fits the FB style is amazingly quick. But on the infra side, everything I saw was a disaster. There were still different specs of servers and each server AFAIK only runs one thing. There's none of the resource constraining stuff Google has. So how would you deploy Cloud to such infra? The answer is you wouldn't because you'd have to rebuild it from scratch and/or create completely different infra to what the rest of the company uses. FB's approach has always beeen to build things quickly and not worry about efficiency. That's not the recipe for success in a low-margin business like cloud.
• sgammon 4y ago
  no. lol
• sgammon 4y ago
  i would absolutely never trust Facebook-run infra, ever, in a million trillion years
• ardel95 4y ago
  There is a huge difference between running infrastructure on behalf of a single, well-intentioned business and running infrastructure that needs to deal with high density, adversarial multi-tenancy. Not saying they can’t do it if they really committed, but the premise of the question that “they already have technical expertise” is flawed. Btw, this is the similar learning curve that Google went through (and arguably still going through) when they decided that they could expose their awesome infra to external customers.