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Comment by rthnbgrredf | Hacker News Reader

Meta could build their own cloud offering. But it would take years to match the current existing offerings of AWS, Azure and GCP in terms of scale and wide range of cloud solutions.

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And then there's sales. All of those three - and more you haven't considered, like the Chinese mega-IT companies - spend huge amounts on training, partnerships, consultancy, etc to get companies to use their services instead of their competitors. My current employer seems all-in on Azure, previous one was AWS.

There was one manager who worked at two large Dutch companies and sold AWS to them, as in, moving their entire IT, workloads and servers over to AWS. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a deal made there somewhere.

The real question is: why aren't they? They had the infrastructure needed to seed a cloud offering 10 years ago. Heck, if Oracle managed to be in 5th (6th? 7th?) place, Facebook for sure could have been a top 5 contender, at least.

because meta sucks at software, documentation and making sure end user products work in a supported way.

Offering reliable IaaS is super hard and capital intensive. Its also not profitable if you are perceived as shit.

>because meta sucks at software

Google started a cloud and their user-facing software is atrocious. Compared e.g. Angular to React, Tensorflow to Pytorch.

Why would you prefer Pytorch to Tensorflow/Keras?

Tensorflow and keras have gotten better, but pytorch historically had better flexibility than keras and was much easier to debug/develop in than tensorflow.

Because it's not their business, they're not good at it and probably the ROI is not worth it.

Also how exactly they would do it, they don't have enough infra for renting, they would need to x10 what they have now.

Because they make more money using their servers for their own products than they would renting them to other people. Meta has an operating margin of 41% AFTER they burn a ton on Reality Labs, while AWS has a 21% margin with more disciplined spending. Social media is a more profitable business than infrastructure.

Does Meta make money from anything other than ads? It's not a dismissive question. I'm curious if social media implies anything other than ads.

> Advertising (over 97.8% of revenues): the company generated over $131 billion in advertising, primarily consisting of displaying ad products on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and third-party.

https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-facebook-make-money/

aww, those existing offerings are overcomplicated as hell, a fresh look could yield substantially simpler cloud developer experience and this would compete well against those other cloud offerings on simplicity alone

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