Is there any potential for Facebook to get into the cloud services market? It seems like Facebook has the experience for high-performance, reliable cloud platform. Using something like Kubernetes could make it easy for customers to try out FB.
They just got out of the cloud services market, see Parse.com
There is definitely potential but they don't want to make money that way. So, don't expect it. Source: I was driving this internally for a while.
I'd rather like to see a FB free and especially free of ads, financed by selling cloud hardware/software.
They just closed $18B in revenue in the past fiscal year. Even if they successfully began selling hardware and were making twice that, they'd be idiots to give up that huge, huge income stream. Their investors would kill them, and for good reason.
They shut down Parse.com, they are not interested in selling that kind of product or don't know how to do it...
Those in-market cloud providers are very secretive about their solutions. But due to the fact they are running and expanding a business that is comparable and bigger than Facbook in size, there is no reason to believe they don't have something highly tailored to their own causes.
There's a lot that goes into building a public cloud that in house solutions won't do because it's unnecessary complexity. A lot of which is security related, which ends being very difficult to bolt onto an existing system.
It sure does sound like they could potentially build an AWS/Google Cloud competitor, but with Oculus just getting started I guess it's not a priority for them at the moment.
Facebook lost their AWS keys not many months ago. Until recently, it was also possible to trivially brute force your way into any user account. Cloud services containing the same bugs would not remain standing for very long. I'm not sure these facts would prevent them from trying though.