Ask HN: Do you think Meta could compete with AWS?
Meta has clear expertise in running huge data-centers. Do you think they could with AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and so on?
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.
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.
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.
Also, AWS is very complicated now, so any new entrant that can build a simpler version from the ground up will be at an advantage
I've written about it before, but facebook should offer its components as a service to startup social products. https://telegra.ph/Facebook-Social-Services-FbSS-a-missed-op...
Who says they are even a "competitor"? This like anti-evil, spam, localization, and login services can apply to a ton of products that are not direct competitors to FB. Sure FB can and will clone just about anything, but you can say the same thing about Amazon and Google and Microsoft, at which point you shouldn't use any cloud services.
You may be on to something there.
Cloud services exist first and foremost to further skew the playingfield in the direction of the larger parties because the economies of scale they create will allow them to compete with you in legal ways that you will find hard to match. That is the reason why these large companies are willing to rent out their data centers to you: you are essentially allowing them to sell you value added bits whilst reducing their own marginal costs in the process. Double win for them.
The fact that they could do even worse doesn't matter much absent proof. But for Facebook I'll make an exception: that company is rotten to the core in a way that not much else is and I highly doubt that there is a barrier low enough that they wouldn't crawl under it.
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.
But even today I would trust that Google does not have a department that scans the contents for your instances for ways to improve their ad revenue, nor do I believe that AWS is secretly selling the contents of your VMs to the nearest equivalent of Cambridge Analytica.
I doubt if AWS would recover from the hit to their reputation if someone provided proof of this happening.
The same, by the way, goes for parties operating on either Google or Apple's app stores: they are treading on very thin ice and if either one of those ever decides to go into the market that you yourself are in and are successful in you can pretty much count on a removal from the respective app store on some pretext, even if that requires writing your very own app store rule.
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.
Not a chance. They're allergic to other OSes and have discontinued MacOS server.
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.
But ultimately I think Apple is still more focused on building consumer products rather than developer services. I'm not sure how they'd retain their identity with such a shift in focus.
Edit-the goal would be to offer a product that makes a suitably skilled designer in the tools roughly equal to a minimally viable UI developer.
Lol you don't remember how Apple's been specifically trying to hold back web technologies to encourage native apps? Embracing WASM is completely against everything they've been doing for the last decade.
Apple wants money. Encouraging/discouraging server-side Swift (by itself) is orthogonal/irrelevant to making money.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/20/apples-enterprise-evolutio...
In a sense they have started to do this in small steps… iCloud Sync, and the new cloud-based service built into Xcode.
I think we would see Apple do more things like GCP’s original vision of App Engine, focused on improving the delivery story for Xcode developers. Write swift actors that run not on the device, but in the cloud. The code could be shipped as part of your app and run in the context of the device user. Or they could offer a shared compute that is, again, integrated into your App Store submission somehow, or maybe is a separate submission, but tied into your Xcode project.
I don’t see them offering a generic hosted VM solution. As you said, it’s too commodity and not worth iterating on for Apple.
Providing more cloud services for the niche of mac developers is not "competing with AWS", is it?
Why would they choose to not focus their expertise on where they make metric tons of money already? What's more compelling about competing with AWS, Azure and GCP on IaaS margins than to keep on doing what works? I expect Apple to expand into more and more consumer products to augment their existing offering, not start something completely unrelated.
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.
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.
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.
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."
But since Facebook has been trying to diversify I too am curious why they haven't tried their own cloud products yet.
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.
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.
Ask any advertiser who has used Facebook, the in app browsers are actively hostile to leaving the app and make conversion more difficult.
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.
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.
No, I do not think Meta could compete with AWS.