[dumbfoundded]

Instagram comes to mind. 13 employees and $1B acquisition.

Hard to imagine that without AWS.

[jakear]

WhatsApp? Similar story, no AWS.

[dumbfoundded]

Well, WhatsApp was started by industry experts in scaling. If you're making a point about functional programming, I'd tend to agree but from a business perspective I'd look to why Netflix still uses AWS: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-use-AWS

[gurrone]

Still they place FreeBSD running on prem hardware in the ISP PoPs as a caching layer because it absolutely makes sense. https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/FOSDEM/looney-Netflix_and_Fr...

[cupofsludge]

I think people tend to forget how often WhatsApp experienced outages in the early days.

[jakear]

This actually speaks volumes. Yes, people forget. Yes, it’s possible to suffer severe growing pains and still get acquired for $$$$. No, you don’t need to start with everything-AWS to ensure 99.9-whatever% uptime. People forget.

[nine_k]

An $1B acquisition may have nothing to do with any colossal infrastructure. Was it indeed colossal?

[dumbfoundded]

I don't know what you'd consider colossal but the migration doesn't sound fun: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/facebook-instagram/

[vidarh]

Why? Sharding and caching blob storage and activity feeds for Instagram type sites is among the easiest category of sites to scale.