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by pavlov 1317 days ago
FB briefly was in the cloud PaaS business when they acquired Parse.

The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.
4 comments
scarface74 1317 days ago
Amazon’s infrastructure was also tightly integrated with its products. Despite the often repeated and very wrong myth that AWS was founded by Amazon selling its “excess capacity”, AWS was always created with a separate infrastructure that was purpose built to sell to other companies:

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...

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lordnacho 1317 days ago
So, loosen the connection? Isn't that what thousands of engineers are for? Didn't Amazon do this originally?

I'm not sure cloud is actually such a great thing for FB but if you're going to do it, that's an inevitable step, isn't it?

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oblio 1317 days ago
Nobody's infra business is really neatly separated. If the will is there, it can be done.
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mbreese 1317 days ago
What about the concept of a data center inside a data center? Given their infrastructure size and necessary geographical layout, it should be possible to have a number of IaaS racks stored inside their existing data center footprint.

If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts.

Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.

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spydum 1317 days ago
not a ton of market for that. and it changes the risk nature of their own facilities. already plenty of hyperscale datacenters with space to lease. what advantage does meta offer? surely they wont beat on price.
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mbreese 1317 days ago
It’s probably not worth the hassle to FB, but it is funny to think about how big of a business this could potentially be. But even a profitable business unit might not make enough profit to actually make it worthwhile.

It could certainly work. But it would probably be too small a business for a company as large as Meta. The differences in scales is (I think) one of their problems. At Meta scale (somewhat a pun), many things are just harder/not worthwhile because of their size.

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