[mightyham]

What is your actual point? You are criticizing Meta for building complex systems by iterating on boring tech like PHP and MySQL, and instead suggesting that they build their systems on top of different boring tech like YAML and Ansible. Why? The fact is that there are no "boring" off-the-shelf solutions for solving the problems that Meta is facing like whole region failures and performant cross-datacenter routing/sharding.

Your comment feels like it's not actually engaging with the contents of this article. It's not that Meta is creating bespoke technologies only out of fear of breaking past code. Their entire methodology of innovation is highly iterative and grounded in feedback through practical demonstration of results. You say that "Facebook creates tech to mitigate the pathologies their past continuously present", as if that is a bad approach, but considering Meta's success, I think it would be wise to seriously reconsider that position.