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Very interesting, in particular the explicit comparisons with hyperscalers. I almost wonder if this is preparation for them launching their own public cloud. A

• olivermuty 2y ago
  It would be pretty impressive to launch a public cloud I would trust even less than GCP :D
  • arjvik 2y ago
    GCP got this reputation because it’s a second class citizen within Google. Google’s own internal infra (Borg, Blaze) is top-notch. If Meta can pull off the public cloud correctly, I’d trust them greatly - they’ve shown significant engineering and product competence till now, even if they could use some more consistent and stable UI.
    • mathverse 2y ago
      Dont all new projects go to gcp within google?
      • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
        Yeah at this stage it doesn't make sense to have two tiers within Google.
      • kridsdale1 2y ago
        Depends on what you mean by new. None of the new features for the mature product I work on have touched it. To the side I have had GCP work but it’s been isolated and as if I were moonlighting.
  • nijave 2y ago
    A lot of Fortune 50 companies compete in some way with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google so are reluctant to use their services. I think Meta has the benefit of less corporate competition Anyway in that context, you don't need trust when you have a sufficiently large legal department
    • VirusNewbie 2y ago
      I doubt there is a single Fortune 50 company that doesn't use one (or more) of the top 3 clouds. I mean, Netflix and Apple even use public clouds quite heavily.
• toast0 2y ago
  I left before they were Meta, and maybe things have changed, but I don't think they have any intention of being a public cloud. Yes, they've got a lot of similar services as a public cloud, but there's a lot of opinionated choices that make sense for them that I think would be hard to convince customers to accept. Their infrastructure is cloudy, but it's built around mostly a single customer and assumes the infrastructure software people and the application software people communicate deeply and continously. Running on a public cloud isn't that similar, at least as a small customer. Could they pivot towards being a cloud service? Probably, but they'd need to do a lot of work to make their platform viable and to earn trust of potential customers, and they'd be entering a crowded market; there's already 6 S&P100 companies in Cloud (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Salesforce), and tons of smaller players. IMHO, given their revenues and profit margins, there's no reason to do all the work it would take to offer cloud services too. Unless there's some opportunistic large customer deal made. They also might also need to renegotiate their content node agreements if they use them to serve cloud customer traffic, and that's a long process.
  • blitzar 2y ago
    > a lot of opinionated choices that make sense for them that I think would be hard to convince customers to accept I get this vibe whenever I use the AWS or GCS dashboards, yet here we are!
• linkregister 2y ago
  Offering a Heroku level of deployment abstraction to one organization's own software engineers, while maintaining performance, is an amazing achievement. Developing a cloud product and all the packaged services with account separation, autoscaling, and multiple regions is another massive endeavor. Think of it as the difference between OCI and AWS. Meta would be unlikely to launch a public cloud uncompetitive with Amazon's feature set.
• Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  It would make sense for them to do so if they have variable load but a lot of hardware waiting for action, like Amazon had back when - busy in the evenings, peak load around the holidays, crickets at night. But if they had that, I'm confident they would have been renting out servers a long time ago now. I wonder if they themselves are customers of the cloud providers.
• bagels 2y ago
  A lot of the ingredients are there, but it would take a ton of work to separate the Facebook from the internal tools, and make them customer facing. The internal tools heavily depend on other internal tools, and none of them were written with customers other than Facebook in mind.
• KaiserPro 2y ago
  No. The infra is not isolated enough to be anywhere near ready for public offerings. Sure there is process isolation, and its hard to break out of the jail/container/whatever you want to call the unit of execution. But its just not ready for public consumption. The methods for monitoring, creating, deploying and scaling the "service(s)" are just too intertwined with internal access. Whilst there is sorta fine grained control on which other services you have access to, its nowhere like AWS et al. the _other_ thing is that everything needs to be compiled to fit the platform. Its not run in VMs, its bare metal processes, with some rather fancy shims to isolate away libc (don't ask me more, I know that its there and some of the reasons why, but the mechanics are a mystery to me). That platform that you compile to is a movingish target. So no, meta isn't going to host thirdparty stuff, mainly because meta doesn't really have enough capacity for what it want to do now, let alone add more consumers.