[tsunamifury]

Click-bait speculation.

Word in the industry was that after two failed attempts to move from AWS to Facebooks metal failed spectacularly and massive attrition after vesting -- no one was left to make it work and Facebook lost the will to keep going.

The more important lesson was that a failure to port a stack from AWS to FB servers caused Facebook to take a $1B write-down. Startups should reconsider their metal, as future acquirers will likely heed this lesson strongly.

[up_and_up]

> after two failed attempts to move from AWS to Facebooks metal failed spectacularly

Seems more like a problem with FB onboarding them and their tech. With some of the smartest people in the world they can't solve problems like this?

> Startups should reconsider their metal, as future acquirers will likely heed this lesson strongly.

Makes no sense. Startups should focus on product and users. Scaling on AWS is somewhat of a no brainer giving more time for what's important: product and users. This seems more like an outlier situation in which FB really didnt care.

[yeukhon]

"Word in the industry" from which industry? From what source? The tone of your messages is pretty scary.

Instagram still run partly on AWS, not sure about the rest like the actual backends.

> Startups should reconsider their metal, as future acquirers will likely heed this lesson strongly.

That's the last thing a startup should worry about. Growth and branding are far more important. Most acquisitions ended up with most of the original team departing from the new company a year or two after the acquisitions, or move on to another production. Your product will be dismantled and re-engineered in house.

[beachstartup]

uhm, i don't know about that conclusion. what you're describing is a basic failed migration. it happens all the time.

all the smart people left, and migrations are hard. very hard. you have to know how the internet actually works, and most people don't have the foggiest fuckin' clue about how anything really works, especially in today's advanced abstraction-driven world.

they should have written it into the vesting contract, probably will in the future.

[lacker]

Discouraging startups from using AWS is so strange, I had to look at your bio. A Googler eh. Perhaps you have some ulterior motive to encourage people to avoid the AWS stack, which is clearly becoming the infrastructure of choice for this generation of startups?

[jacoplane]

Attacking his integrity seems kind of uncalled for.

[tsunamifury]

Well in all humility, I know a lot less about this than you.