Very interesting, in particular the explicit comparisons with hyperscalers.
I almost wonder if this is preparation for them launching their own public cloud. Anyone from Meta care to comment?
I almost wonder if this is preparation for them launching their own public cloud. Anyone from Meta care to comment?
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.
I get this vibe whenever I use the AWS or GCS dashboards, yet here we are!
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.
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.
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.
To the side I have had GCP work but it’s been isolated and as if I were moonlighting.
Anyway in that context, you don't need trust when you have a sufficiently large legal department
I mean, Netflix and Apple even use public clouds quite heavily.
The internal tools heavily depend on other internal tools, and none of them were written with customers other than Facebook in mind.